Auburn is bordered by the cities of Federal Way, Pacific, and Algona to the west, Sumner to the south, Kent to the north, and unincorporated King County to the east. The Muckleshoot Indian Reservation is in or near the southern city limits.

Auburn was originally incorporated as Slaughter, Washington after Lt. William Slaughter, who died in a skirmish fighting Native Americans which are now apart of the modern day Muckleshoot tribe in 1855. At the time, the main hotel in town was called the "Slaughter House." In 1893, a large group of settlers from Auburn, New York, moved to Slaughter, and renamed the town to "Auburn." Due to this history, when Auburn was building its second high school in the mid-1990s, there was a grass-roots effort to name the high school "Slaughter High School," but it was eventually decided that the name would be "Auburn Riverside High School," whose mascots are the Ravens.

There are several locations in and around Auburn on the National and State Registers of Historic Places including the Neely Mansion.

The city of Auburn, located 28 miles (45 km) south of Seattle, Washington, was home to some of the earliest settlers in King County. Nestled in a fertile river valley, Auburn has been both a farm community and a center of business and industry for more than 150 years. Auburn is located near the original confluence of the Green and White rivers, both of which contain runoff water from the Cascade Mountain range. The valley was originally the home of the Skopamish, Smalhkamish, and Stkamish Indian tribes. The first white men in the region were explorers and traders who arrived in the 1830s.

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