US Map / County Maps / Virginia

Virginia County and Independent City Map

Virginia has 95 counties and 38 independent cities, and not one of those cities is inside a county.

Everywhere else in the United States, a city sits inside a county and its residents pay both. Virginia settled the question differently. Since the constitution of 1871, any Virginia community incorporated as a city is automatically separate from the county around it, providing every county service itself and answering to no county board. Thirty-eight of the roughly forty-one independent cities in the country are in Virginia.

The largest counties and cities of Virginia

Four of the ten largest county-level units in Virginia are cities, not counties. Fairfax County's seat is the city of Fairfax, which is not part of Fairfax County; Prince William County's seat is Manassas, which is likewise independent of it. Arlington County has no county seat at all, because there is no incorporated place inside it.

Independent cities, towns, and reversion

The distinction that matters in Virginia is between a city and a town. A town remains part of its county: its residents vote in county elections, pay county taxes, and use county schools, and the town government adds services on top. A city is separate in every respect. The threshold has been 5,000 residents since 1971, and because becoming a city removes a community's tax base from the county, the General Assembly has imposed a moratorium on new city incorporations that has been renewed continuously since 1987.

The traffic has since run the other way. Three cities have reverted to town status — South Boston rejoining Halifax County in 1995, Clifton Forge rejoining Alleghany County in 2001, and Bedford rejoining Bedford County in 2013 — because independence meant paying for a school system and a jail alone. Several counties and cities have also consolidated: Virginia Beach is the result of a 1963 merger with Princess Anne County, and Chesapeake of the same year's merger of South Norfolk with Norfolk County, which is why two of the state's largest cities are also two of its largest by area and contain a great deal of farmland and swamp.

Largest and smallest counties and cities

Fairfax County is the most populous at 1,160,925 in the 2024 estimates — 13% of Virginia — and it is the Washington suburbs. Prince William County follows at 497,003. The largest independent city is Virginia Beach at 454,808, ahead of Chesapeake, Richmond, and Norfolk. The smallest unit of all is Highland County in the Alleghenies on the West Virginia line, 2,348 people in country steep enough to be called Virginia's Switzerland; Norton city, in the far south-west coalfield, is the least populous independent city in the country at 3,478. Pittsylvania County, on the North Carolina line, is the largest by land area at about 970 square miles.

The Virginia state page covers the Blue Ridge and the Tidewater, and the county map index covers all 50 states. Bordering county maps: Maryland, which has one independent city of its own, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The Appalachian Mountains page follows the ridges that shape the western counties.