US Map / County Maps / Nevada

Nevada County Map

Nevada has sixteen counties and one independent city, and Clark County alone holds nearly three-quarters of the state.

Nevada's counties were laid out during the Comstock silver rush and the mining booms that followed, when a strike could create a town of 10,000 in a year and empty it in five. Story County, which held Virginia City, was once the richest place in the West; it now has about 4,000 residents. Because the boundaries were drawn on a map rather than on the ground, most of them are straight lines that ignore the mountain ranges they cross.

The 16 counties and one city of Nevada

Clark County is 73% of Nevada by itself, and with Washoe the two hold nearly nine tenths of the state. Carson City appears in the list as a county equivalent because it is one.

Carson City, Bullfrog County, and counties larger than states

Carson City is not in a county. Ormsby County, the smallest in the state, was dissolved on 1 July 1969 and consolidated with the city of Carson City, producing a single government that is treated as a county equivalent for every federal purpose. It is the only consolidated municipality in Nevada, and the state capital.

The strangest entry in the state's county history lasted under two years. In 1987 the legislature created Bullfrog County out of a slice of Nye County containing Yucca Mountain, the proposed federal nuclear waste repository, and nothing else — no residents, no roads, no town. Its seat was legally placed in Carson City, 250 miles away, and its purpose was to capture a state tax on the repository without sharing it with Nye County. A district court held it unconstitutional in 1989, on the grounds that a county with no residents cannot elect the officers the constitution requires, and it was abolished. Elsewhere Nevada's counties are conventional boards of three to seven commissioners; what is unusual is their size, since several of them are larger than entire eastern states and contain a single town.

Largest and smallest counties

Clark County is the most populous at 2,398,871 in the 2024 estimates and contains Las Vegas, Henderson, and North Las Vegas. Washoe County, which is Reno, is second at 507,280. The smallest is Esmeralda County on the California line, 720 people in about 3,580 square miles, with its courthouse at Goldfield. Nye County is the largest by land area at roughly 18,160 square miles — outside Alaska only San Bernardino and Coconino counties are bigger, and Nye alone is larger than Vermont and Connecticut combined.

See the Nevada state page for the basins and ranges, or the county map index for every state. The neighbors: California, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, and Arizona. The Mojave Desert page covers the southern corner where most Nevadans actually live.