How many counties are in the United States?

The count by type

The Census Bureau treats every unit below in the same way for statistics, so federal tables that say "county" include all of them. The total is what you get when you count distinct 5 digit county codes in the 2024 Gazetteer for the 50 states and DC. Puerto Rico's municipios and the island areas are also county-equivalents but fall outside this count.

Which states have the most and fewest

Texas leads with 254, followed by Georgia with 159 and Virginia with 133. Those three alone hold 546 units, 17.4% of the national total. The median state has 62.

At the low end, Hawaii (5), Rhode Island (5), Delaware (3), District of Columbia (1) have five or fewer. DC counts as a single county-equivalent. The full list is in the ranking of states by number of counties.

Why the number changes

Counties are created, merged, renamed and dissolved by state law, and the Census Bureau records each change. Two recent changes moved the total. Alaska's Valdez-Cordova Census Area split into Chugach and Copper River effective January 2, 2019, adding one unit. In 2022 the Census Bureau adopted Connecticut's nine councils of governments as county-equivalents, replacing the state's eight historical counties and adding one more.

That is why older sources give different totals. Always check which year a county list comes from before comparing counts or joining files. The FIPS codes guide lists the code ranges involved.

How different counties are

County-equivalents range from a few square miles to more than 80,000, and from a few dozen residents to millions. The typical county guide shows the median and the spread, and the rankings list the largest counties by area and the most populous counties.

Counts for every state

County count does not follow state size

Large states do not always have many counties. Average land per county ranges from 207 square miles in Rhode Island to 19,041 in Alaska. Among states with ten or more units, Virginia has the smallest average, 297 square miles, partly because its independent cities count as separate units.

Residents per county vary even more. The average county in California has 679,849 residents, while in South Dakota it has 14,010. That matters for any comparison "by county": a county-level statistic in one state can describe a unit many times larger than in another.

Counting counties in your own data

To reproduce the total, count distinct 5 digit codes in a county file for the 50 states and DC, and leave out codes starting with 60, 66, 69, 72 and 78, which belong to American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. If your count differs by one or two, check Connecticut and the Alaska census areas first, since those changed most recently. If it differs by 38, the file probably dropped Virginia's independent cities.

Counties in time series

A county count only makes sense with a date. A table of county data for 2018 and one for 2024 cover slightly different sets of units, so a simple join between them leaves unmatched rows in Alaska and Connecticut. Before comparing across years, map the old codes to the new ones, and state in any chart which county list it uses. Every figure on this site uses the 2024 list of 3,144.