What is an independent city, and why does Virginia have 38 of them?
Cities that sit inside no county at all. Virginia has 38, three other states have one each, and it is the single most common cause of a broken county dataset.
An independent city belongs to no county. It is not a city sitting inside a county, the way almost every other American municipality is. It is a county-equivalent in its own right, on the same rung of the ladder as a county, with its own FIPS code and its own row in every Census file. Virginia has 38 of them, by far the largest concentration anywhere. Added to the state’s 95 counties, that gives Virginia 133 county-equivalents, more than any state except Texas (254) and Georgia (159). For scale, there are 3,144 county-equivalents in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Nationally, 40 entities carry the legal type “independent city”. Thirty-eight of them are Virginia’s. The other two are Baltimore city, Maryland and St. Louis city, Missouri. Carson City, Nevada is the same idea recorded differently: it has no type word at all in Census files, because its legal name is literally “Carson City”. Only one other entity in the country is filed without a type word, and that is the District of Columbia.
What makes Virginia different
Every state lets a place incorporate as a city. Almost everywhere else, incorporating changes what the municipality can do without changing which county it sits in. The city government and the county government stack on top of one another, and a resident pays into both.
Virginia treats becoming a city as a separation. A place chartered as a city stops being part of the county around it and takes on the functions the county would otherwise perform inside its boundaries. A place that stays a town remains inside its county and keeps the two-layer arrangement everyone else has. The dividing line in Virginia is therefore town versus city, not incorporated versus unincorporated.
Where the arrangement came from is a longer argument than it is usually given credit for, and this page will not try to settle it. The effect is not in doubt. Because a Virginia city is not in a county, it does not appear in county totals, and it needs its own entry in any dataset keyed on county-equivalents. Sum Virginia’s 95 counties alone and you are missing every resident of every independent city in the state, Richmond included.
The reverse case turns up as well. Two Virginia counties, Arlington (51013) and Henrico (51087), are ordinary counties whose seats are unincorporated places rather than incorporated cities. Nationally, 54 county-equivalents are their own seat, which is what happens when the entity is itself a city. If the vocabulary here is unfamiliar, our explainer on what a county is sets out the ordinary case before the exceptions start.
Bedford went the other way
The count moves in both directions. Bedford city was an independent city until it reverted to town status, effective 1 July 2013, and became a town inside Bedford County. That is the mechanism running backwards: a city gave up its charter, the county took the functions back, and one county-equivalent left the national total.
Bedford city is gone from current Census files. It is still in older ones. Any analysis that joins a pre-2013 Virginia table to a current one will find a row with no partner, and the right reading is not a data error but a real change in the geography. This is the same class of problem as Connecticut’s eight counties being replaced by nine planning regions, or Alaska’s Valdez-Cordova Census Area splitting into Chugach (02063) and Copper River (02066) on 2 January 2019. Identifiers are stable only until the entity underneath them stops existing.
Four names that are two places
Here is where it bites. Four Virginia names exist as both a county and an independent city, and the two are separate entities that do not contain each other. Richmond city, the state capital, is not in Richmond County. Fairfax city and Fairfax County are two rows in the Census files, not one place recorded twice.
| Name | Legal type | GEOID |
|---|---|---|
| Fairfax County | County | 51059 |
| Fairfax city | Independent city | 51600 |
| Franklin County | County | 51067 |
| Franklin city | Independent city | 51620 |
| Richmond County | County | 51159 |
| Richmond city | Independent city | 51760 |
| Roanoke County | County | 51161 |
| Roanoke city | Independent city | 51770 |
Look at the codes rather than the names. A FIPS county code is five digits, two for the state and three for the county, zero padded and stored as text rather than as a number. Within a state the last three digits are assigned alphabetically, which is why a rename usually forces a new code: Shannon County, South Dakota (46113) became Oglala Lakota County (46102) in May 2015. Independent cities sit well above the counties of the same state in that numbering. Baltimore city is 24510 against Baltimore County’s 24005, St. Louis city is 29510 against St. Louis County’s 29189, Carson City is 32510, and Virginia’s four collision cities are 51600, 51620, 51760 and 51770. This page will not assert the exact rule behind that range, but the working point holds: the code identifies the place and the name does not.
If you need an identifier that survives a rename, use COUNTYNS, the eight-digit GNIS id, which stays put when the FIPS code moves. Our note on how FIPS codes are built and when they change covers the rest of the numbering rules.
Why this site keys on the full legal name
A URL of the form /virginia/richmond/ cannot work. There is no honest answer to the question of which Richmond it means, and a redirect or a disambiguation page only moves the problem somewhere else. So every page here is keyed on the full legal name as the Census Bureau writes it, which makes the two Richmonds /virginia/richmond-county/ and /virginia/richmond-city/. The Virginia state index lists all 133 entries in that form, and the four collision pairs sit next to each other in it.
Follow the Bureau’s casing while you are there. It writes the suffix in lowercase, as “Fairfax city”, not “Fairfax City”. It looks like a typo and it is not. The lowercase word marks the legal type rather than forming part of the proper name, whereas “Fairfax County” takes a capital because County is part of the entity’s name. Match that casing when you join on name strings, because a case-sensitive join will otherwise drop every independent city in the country.
The smallest county-equivalents anywhere
One more consequence. Because a Virginia city can be tiny and still be a county-equivalent, the smallest county-equivalents in the United States by land area are all Virginia independent cities.
| Entity | Land area, square miles |
|---|---|
| Falls Church city, Virginia | 2.05 |
| Lexington city, Virginia | 2.50 |
| Manassas Park city, Virginia | 3.03 |
| Covington city, Virginia | 5.47 |
| Fairfax city, Virginia | 6.24 |
| Buena Vista city, Virginia | 6.44 |
The smallest entity actually called a county is Kalawao County, Hawaii, at 11.99 square miles, and it is an oddity on its own terms: population 82, no county government, and a mayor who is by law the Director of the Hawaii Department of Health. The full spread runs from Falls Church at 2.05 square miles up to Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area in Alaska at 145,767.49, and it is set out in the largest and smallest counties explainer, with the ordered list at smallest counties by area.
Their size causes trouble in map rendering too. When county polygons are simplified for the web, mapshaper’s option to preserve small shapes has to be switched on, or 43 entities collapse to empty geometry, and 24 of those are Virginia independent cities. Simplification on this site is also run per state rather than at one national percentage, with each state’s threshold computed from its own metres per pixel at render width so that no point moves more than half a pixel. A single national figure of 494 metres would be about half a pixel on Virginia but 24 pixels on the District of Columbia, where it erases the Potomac frontage entirely. Small independent cities are exactly the shapes a coarse threshold destroys first, which is a good reason to check any Virginia map against the entity count before trusting it.