Palmer is a city in and the borough seat of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, Alaska, United States, located 42 miles northeast of Anchor…Palmer is a city in and the borough seat of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, Alaska, United States, located 42 miles northeast of Anchorage on the Glenn Highway in the Matanuska Valley. It is the ninth-largest city in Alaska, and forms part of the Anchorage Metropolitan Statistical Area. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city is 5,888, down from 5,937 in 2010.