Address to county lookup

County-equivalents it can return

Not every answer is a county. The Census file this site uses has 64 Louisiana parishes, 30 Alaska boroughs and census areas, 41 independent cities, and 9 Connecticut planning regions among its 3,144 units. The result uses the right word for each.

How to use it

1. Type a street address, city, or landmark into the search box. Include the city and state to avoid matches with the same name elsewhere.
2. Pick the right match from the list. You can also click the map directly if you know where the place is.
3. The result line gives the county-equivalent's full name, the state abbreviation, and the five-digit FIPS code in brackets.
4. For population, land area, and income of that county, open the same point in What county am I in?, or find the county page from its state.

Two steps: geocode, then test

The address goes to Photon, a geocoder built on OpenStreetMap. It returns a latitude and longitude for the best match. The county step is local: the page loads the county outline file once, then checks which outline contains the point.

The split matters for accuracy. A wrong county almost always comes from a wrong geocode, such as a street name that exists in two towns. Check that the matched label under the search box is the place you meant before trusting the county.

Reading the FIPS code

The five digits are the two-digit state code followed by the three-digit county code. Los Angeles County, California, is 06037: 06 for California and 037 for the county. The code is what most federal datasets use to join county records, so it is often more useful than the name.

To look up a code or a name directly, use the FIPS code lookup.

Known limits

County outlines are the Census 2024 cartographic boundary file, simplified for the web, so a point within a few hundred meters of a county line can land on the wrong side. Addresses at sea or outside the 50 states and DC return no county.

For a point you already have as coordinates, or a GPS fix, skip the geocoder and use What county am I in?, which also shows population, land area, and income.