Pauls Valley is a city in and the county seat of Garvin County, Oklahoma, United States. The population was 5,992 at the 2020 census, a decline of 3.2 percent from the figure of 6,187 in 2010. It was settled by and named for Smith Paul, a North Carolina native who married a Chickasaw woman and became a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation before the Civil War. The town economy is largely based on agriculture and oil production.