What is a county, and what does it actually do?
The unit almost every American lives in, what it is responsible for, and why nine different legal types all count as one.
Almost every person in the United States lives in a county. There are 3,144 of them, they cover every square mile of the fifty states and the District of Columbia with no gaps and no overlaps, and most people could not draw the boundary of the one they live in.
A county is the primary administrative division below the state. That is the short answer, and it is true almost everywhere. The longer answer is more interesting, because the United States does not actually have 3,144 counties. It has 3,144 county-equivalents, spread across nine different legal types, and in thirty-five of them there is no county government at all.
What a county government does
Where a county government exists, its responsibilities are remarkably consistent across the country, because they descend from the same English model. A typical county runs:
- The courts. The county courthouse is not a decorative building. Trial courts of general jurisdiction are organised by county in almost every state, and the county clerk keeps their records.
- Property records. Deeds, mortgages, liens and plats are recorded at county level. This is why property research always ends up at a county recorder’s office.
- Property assessment and tax collection. The assessor values property, the collector bills it. In many states this is the single largest thing a county does by budget.
- Elections. Voter registration, polling places and the count are almost always county functions, which is why US election results are reported by county.
- Vital records. Birth, death and marriage certificates.
- The sheriff. Law enforcement in unincorporated areas, the county jail, and service of court process.
- Roads and bridges outside city limits, which in rural states can be thousands of miles.
Cities sit inside counties and take over many of these functions within their own limits. That is why a resident of a large city can go years without dealing with the county directly, while a rural resident deals with it constantly.
The nine legal types
The Census Bureau assigns every county-equivalent a legal or statistical area description. Across the fifty states and DC, nine of them are in use.
| Type | Count | Where |
|---|---|---|
| County | 2,999 | Forty-eight states |
| Parish | 64 | Louisiana only |
| Independent city | 40 | Virginia (38), Maryland, Missouri |
| Borough | 13 | Alaska |
| Census area | 11 | Alaska |
| City and borough | 4 | Alaska |
| Municipality | 2 | Alaska |
| Planning region | 9 | Connecticut only |
| No type word at all | 2 | The District of Columbia and Carson City |
Three states account for almost all of the irregularity.
Louisiana kept the word parish from the ecclesiastical districts of its Spanish colonial period, retained them under French rule, and wrote them into law in 1807.
Alaska never adopted counties. Its 1959 constitution created boroughs instead, and the enormous part of the state that never organised itself into one is a single Unorganized Borough. The Census Bureau subdivides that into eleven census areas purely so that it has something to publish statistics against. Those eleven are not governments and never have been.
Connecticut abolished county government in 1960, kept the empty county boundaries for another sixty-two years, and finally replaced all eight with nine planning regions in the 2022 Census vintage.
Then there are the independent cities: places that belong to no county at all and are county-equivalents in their own right. Virginia has thirty-eight, which is why the state has 133 county-equivalents made up of 95 counties and 38 cities.
Thirty-five places with no county government
The most common mistake in a county dataset is assuming every entity has a government, a seat and a website. Thirty-five do not:
- All nine Connecticut planning regions. They are councils of governments, not county governments.
- All five Rhode Island counties. Rhode Island abolished county government in 1846. The boundaries survive as judicial districts and nothing else.
- Nine of the fourteen Massachusetts counties. Their governments were abolished between 1997 and 2000 and their functions transferred to the state. Barnstable, Bristol, Dukes, Norfolk and Plymouth kept theirs.
- All eleven Alaska census areas. Census Bureau constructs, with no government of any kind.
- Kalawao County, Hawaii. Population 82. It has no elected government; under Hawaii law the Director of the Department of Health serves as its mayor.
On this site every county page carries a flag for this, and where a county has no government the page says so rather than printing a heading that would be false.
County versus county-equivalent
The distinction matters more than it sounds. “County” is a legal term that forty-eight states use. “County-equivalent” is the Census Bureau’s category for anything occupying the same position in the geographic hierarchy, whatever it happens to be called locally.
This is why the answer to “how many counties are in the United States” depends on the question behind it. Entities legally called counties: 2,999. Everything at that level across the fifty states and DC: 3,144. Add Puerto Rico’s 78 municipios and the island areas: 3,235.
The Census Bureau’s own press releases use the phrase “the nation’s 3,143 counties and the District of Columbia”, which adds up to 3,144 records while technically calling only 3,143 of them counties. The full explanation is here.
Why the boundaries look the way they do
Look at a national county map and there is a visible seam running roughly down the middle of the country. East of it, county boundaries wander: they follow rivers, ridgelines and old survey metes. West of it, they are rectangles.
That is the Public Land Survey System. Land east of the original states was largely settled before systematic survey, so boundaries were drawn against whatever features were already on the ground. Land to the west was surveyed into a grid of townships and ranges before settlement, and counties were cut out of that grid. Texas, which entered the Union owning its own public lands, is a case of its own and ended up with 254 counties, more than any other state by a margin of 95.
How counties are identified
Every county has a five-digit FIPS code: two digits for the state, three for the county. Los
Angeles County is 06037, where 06 is California. The codes are assigned alphabetically within
each state, which has an awkward consequence: renaming a county usually forces a new code, because
the new name sorts differently. That is why Shannon County, South Dakota became Oglala Lakota
County with a new code in 2015, and why a join against older data can silently drop rows.
The code has to be stored as text, not as a number. Alabama’s Autauga County is 01001, and any
system that stores that as an integer turns it into 1001 and breaks every lookup.
Where to go next
- How many counties are there in the United States? works through why three different answers are all defensible.
- The 35 US counties that have no county government covers each case.
- What is an independent city? explains the single most common cause of a broken county dataset.
- Or start from a map: browse any state and click through to a county.