What does a typical US county look like?

Average vs median

Divide the 340,110,988 people in the Vintage 2024 estimates by 3,144 county-equivalents and you get an average of 108,178. But most counties are far smaller. Line them all up by population and the one in the middle has 26,122. Cherokee County, AL, with 26,138 residents, sits almost exactly there.

The same gap shows up in land area. The average county covers 1,124 square miles, but the median covers 616. Alaska's huge boroughs and the large counties of the West raise the average.

The spread in one table

Each row is a percentile: 10% of counties fall below the first row, 90% below the last. Percentiles are computed separately for each column, so a row does not describe one county.

Half the country lives in a few counties

Sort counties from most to least populous and add them up: the first 145 counties, 4.6% of the total, hold half of all residents. At the other end, 737 counties have fewer than 10,000 people and together hold 3,982,299, or 1.2% of the population. 50 counties have a million or more.

The typical county's income

The median of county median household incomes is $62,851 across 3,143 counties with a SAIPE 2023 estimate. That is a median of medians, and it is not the national median household income, because each county counts once regardless of how many households it has. The SAIPE income guide explains how the county estimates are made.

Compare your county

Every county page shows where that county falls against the national median and its state median, with rank rulers for population, land, density and income. Start from the state list, or put two counties side by side with the compare two counties tool below.

The typical county differs by state

The national median hides big differences between states. The median county in Massachusetts has 503,121 residents, while in North Dakota it has 3,853. 28 states have a median county above the national median of 26,122.

So a county that is typical in one state can be large or small by national standards. Each state page ranks its counties within the state, and each county page shows both ranks side by side.

Reading your county's percentile

If a county page says a county is in the top quarter for population, its population is above the 75th percentile in the table above, 70,292 residents. The top tenth starts at 228,347. Because the distribution is so skewed, moving from the median to the 90th percentile means roughly a 9-fold increase in residents, while the same step in median household income is 36%.

The typical county's land

The median county covers 616 square miles, about a square 25 miles on a side. The middle half of counties fall between 431 and 924 square miles. That range is narrow compared with population, where the middle half runs from 10,800 to 70,292 residents.

The extremes

The least populous county-equivalent is Loving County, TX, with 48 residents. The most populous is Los Angeles County, CA, with 9,757,179, about 374 times the median county. Numbers that far apart are why averages of county values need care: one county can count as much as hundreds of others.