Which county you are in decides where you register a car, vote, pay property tax, file court papers or call for a permit, and it is surprisingly hard to tell on an ordinary map, because Google Maps and most phone maps do not draw county lines. This lookup shows all 3,231 counties and county equivalents of the United States: the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico's municipios and the island areas. Use your phone's location, type a five-digit ZIP code, search for a town or click anywhere on the map, and the county is filled in green with its neighbours in orange. The panel gives the full name (Louisiana has parishes, Alaska boroughs and census areas, and Virginia has independent cities that belong to no county), the state, the five-digit FIPS code used in Census and government data, the area of the county, and how far your point is from the nearest county line. Click a neighbour in the list to move to it, copy the county name, share a link to the point, or download the county outline as GeoJSON or KML for Google Earth and GIS programs.
How to use it
- Press "Use my location", type a ZIP code, search a town or click anywhere in the United States on the map.
- Read the county, state and FIPS code in the panel, and check the distance to the nearest county line.
- Click a neighbouring county in the list to see it, or copy the county name.
- Download the county outline as GeoJSON or KML, or copy the share link to the point.
How accurate is it?
How the county is found
The point is tested against the county outlines from the US Census Bureau's cartographic boundary file (2017 edition, public domain), packaged for the web by the us-atlas project. To keep the whole country small enough to load in a browser, the outlines are simplified for a map at a scale of 1:10 million, with corners about 100–300 m apart and fewer bends along rivers. Away from a county line the answer is right; close to one it can be wrong. We checked the tool against the county codes GeoNames gives for about 40,500 US postal codes: 97.7 % agreed, and half of the rest were within about 1 km of a county line.
The distance to the county line
The panel shows how far the point is from the nearest line of the simplified outline and which county lies on the other side. Under 2 km the tool warns that the point may be in the neighbouring county. On a winding river boundary the real line can be several kilometres from the simplified one, so treat the figure as a guide and check the county's own map when an address is close to the line.
Area and neighbours
The area is calculated on the WGS84 ellipsoid with GeographicLib from the simplified outline. It includes lakes and rivers inside the county but not the sea, and is usually within a few per cent of the Census figure. Neighbours are the counties that share a stretch of boundary; counties that only touch at a corner, like those at the Four Corners, are not listed.
Good to know
ZIP codes cross county lines
A ZIP code is a set of postal delivery routes, not an area, and many of them cover parts of two or more counties. The ZIP code search uses the Census Bureau's internal point of the ZIP Code Tabulation Area, so it gives the county where most of the ZIP code is, not necessarily the county of a particular house. Use your location or click the house on the map instead.
The city in your address may be in another county
The town name in a postal address is the post office that delivers the mail, and it can lie in a different county from the house. Cities such as New York, Atlanta, Dallas and Kansas City also spread over several counties, so a town search only gives the county at the town centre.
Recent changes and very small counties
The data is the 2017 edition. Since then Alaska's Valdez-Cordova Census Area has been split in two (2019) and Connecticut has replaced its eight counties with nine planning regions for statistics (2022); the map shows the older units. Falls Church in Virginia, an independent city of about 5 km², is too small for the simplified outlines and is shown as part of its neighbour.
Frequently asked questions
What county am I in right now?
Press "Use my location" and allow your browser to share its position. The county is filled in green and named in the panel with its state and FIPS code. Your position is used in your browser only and is never sent to GeoDrafter.
How do I find the county of a ZIP code?
Type the five-digit ZIP code and press Go. The tool shows the county at the centre of the ZIP code area. If the ZIP code crosses a county line, click the address on the map to get the county of that exact spot.
Why does Google Maps not show county lines?
Google Maps shows a county outline only when you search for the county by name. This tool draws every county line at once, state lines darker, so you can see where one county ends and the next begins.
What is a county FIPS code?
A five-digit code from the Federal Information Processing Standards: two digits for the state and three for the county, for example 08031 for Denver County, Colorado. It is used in Census tables, election results and many government data sets.
Is a parish or a borough the same as a county?
For maps and statistics, yes. Louisiana is divided into parishes and Alaska into boroughs and census areas, and the Census Bureau treats them, independent cities and Puerto Rico's municipios as county equivalents. They are all shown and named here.
Something wrong or missing? E-mail [email protected] and it will be fixed.