The city's population nearly doubled between 2010 and 2020, due largely to the North Dakota oil boom.

Highways 2 and 85, near the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers, at the upper end of the Lake Sakakawea reservoir.

Williston is in northwestern North Dakota's booming oil patch, where adequate, affordable housing has become a concern since the 2010s.

[19] According to a February 2014 article in Business Insider, Williston had the highest apartment rents in the United States.

The six leading ancestry groups in the city are Norwegian (47.8%), German (31.6%), Irish (9.6%), English (5.8%), Swedish (4.5%), Dutch (4.3%) and French (4.0%).

Williston's economy, while historically based in agriculture and especially ranching, is increasingly being driven by the oil industry.

The Williston Basin, named after the town, is a huge subterranean geologic feature known for its rich deposits of petroleum, coal, and potash.

Williston developed over the Bakken formation, which by the end of 2012 was predicted to be producing more oil than any other site in the United States, surpassing even Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, the longtime leader in domestic output in the nation.

In 1995, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that there were 150 million barrels of oil "technically recoverable" from the Bakken shale.

[28] Williston has seen a huge increase in population and infrastructure investments during the last several years with expanded drilling using the fracking petroleum extraction technique in the Bakken Formation and Three Forks Groups.

[29] Examples of oil industry-related infrastructure investments are the multi-acre branch campus of Baker Hughes and the Sand Creek Retail Center.

Forts Union and Buford, as well as the nearby confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers west of the city, associated with the history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and development of the fur trade and frontier—are destinations for area tourism.

Williston is also comparatively close to the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

[41] The main library also serves as a community center, hosting many groups that hold public meetings there.

The first Williston Public Library was completed in town in 1911, opening February 27, 1911, and it operated as the only facility until 1983.

In the early 1990s the city began to address the issue of probable demolition of this aged building to replace it with one meeting modern needs.

In 1993 a concerned group of citizens formed the James Memorial Preservation Society to save the historic building and develop it as a center for the visual arts.

After the library moved to a new building on Davidson Drive, this structure became known as the James Memorial Art Center.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, KXMD and KUMV were rebroadcast across Saskatchewan as part of that region's first terrestrial-based cable television system.

The Saturday service has an early cutoff time and pickups are limited to in-town stops and drop box locations only.

Amtrak, the national passenger rail system, serves a station in Williston via its Empire Builder, a once-daily train in each direction between Portland, Oregon/Seattle, Washington, and Chicago.

Fairlight has the only Veteran's Affairs clinic in northwestern North Dakota and also serves residents of northeastern Montana.

Patients receive treatment for a wide variety of cancers including breast, gynecologic, head and neck, lung and prostate.

Mercy Medical Center broke ground August 24, 2012 on an expanded cancer treatment facility.

[46] Mercy Medical Center was named among the Top 100 Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) in the United States by The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations in September 2012.