US Map / County Maps

US County Maps by State

The 50 states are divided into more than 3,100 counties and county-equivalents. Pick a state below to open its county map.

Counties per state

County-equivalents per state. Louisiana uses parishes; Alaska uses boroughs and census areas.
State	Counties
Alabama	67
Alaska	30
Arizona	15
Arkansas	75
California	58
Colorado	64
Connecticut	8
Delaware	3
Florida	67
Georgia	159
Hawaii	5
Idaho	44
Illinois	102
Indiana	92
Iowa	99
Kansas	105
Kentucky	120
Louisiana	64
Maine	16
Maryland	24
Massachusetts	14
Michigan	83
Minnesota	87
Mississippi	82
Missouri	115
Montana	56
Nebraska	93
Nevada	17
New Hampshire	10
New Jersey	21
New Mexico	33
New York	62
North Carolina	100
North Dakota	53
Ohio	88
Oklahoma	77
Oregon	36
Pennsylvania	67
Rhode Island	5
South Carolina	46
South Dakota	66
Tennessee	95
Texas	254
Utah	29
Vermont	14
Virginia	133
Washington	39
West Virginia	55
Wisconsin	72
Wyoming	23

What counts as a county

Most states use the word "county," but not all. Louisiana is divided into parishes and Alaska into boroughs, with the remote parts of Alaska grouped into census areas that exist only for statistics. A few cities — Baltimore, St. Louis, Carson City, and the independent cities of Virginia — are county-equivalents in their own right, belonging to no county at all.

Connecticut is the odd one out in the other direction: its eight historical counties no longer have governments and the state now reports federal statistics through nine planning regions, though the county names remain on maps and in addresses. The table above counts Connecticut's eight, which is why it sums to 3,142 where federal tables using the planning regions give 3,143.

Extremes worth knowing

Texas has 254 counties, the most of any state; Delaware has just three. San Bernardino County, California is the largest by area in the contiguous US — bigger than nine states. The county pattern also reveals history: states surveyed early in the East have small, irregular counties shaped by rivers and settlements, while western states have large rectangular ones drawn by survey lines.

Why the small eastern counties exist

The rule of thumb that shaped most of them was a day's ride. A county seat had to be reachable and returnable within a day by horse from anywhere in the county, which put the practical radius at roughly 15 to 25 miles and produced the small, dense counties of Georgia, Kentucky and Virginia. States settled after the railroad — and after the automobile — never needed that constraint, which is why Arizona covers a larger area with 15 counties than Georgia does with 159.

What a county actually does

In most states the county records deeds, runs the courts and the sheriff's office, maintains rural roads, and administers elections — which is why election results are reported county by county. In New England, towns hold nearly all of those powers and the county is a judicial district at most. That difference is the reason Connecticut could abolish county government in 1960 without anything changing on the ground, while abolishing counties in Texas would leave most of the state without a functioning local government.

County maps by state

Each state below opens a map of every county in that state, a table of its ten most populous counties with their seats, and a note on how its system is organized.