U.S. Counties

Every U.S. county and county-equivalent, grouped under its state, the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico: 3,274 entries by FIPS code, searchable by code or by name. Published by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Provenance

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division
Effective version: Vintage 2025
Retrieved: 2026-09-23
Refresh cadence: Annually, each May
Licence: U.S. Government work. Not subject to copyright protection in the United States (17 U.S.C. §105). The Census Bureau requests citation rather than imposing licence terms. Read the licence
Attribution: Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, Vintage 2025 FIPS codes

Field schema

3,274 items, across 2 hierarchy levels: state, county.

state: 52
county: 3,222

Every field this dataset’s items carry
Field	Type	Meaning
value	string	The canonical, unique value — what a query resolves to.
displayValue	string	The locale-resolved label a suggestion renders.
description	string, optional	Free-text detail shown beside the item. NAICS uses it for the ancestor breadcrumb; not every dataset sets it.
parentSourceId	string, optional	The parent item in the source’s own key space, for a hierarchical dataset.
hierarchyLevel	string, optional	Which level of the hierarchy this item sits at.
displayOrder	integer	Curated display order, distinct from relevance rank (`DEC-LIST-004`).
aliases	string[]	Alternate spellings that resolve to this item at no extra runtime KV read (`DEC-ALIAS-001`).
metadata	object	Dataset-specific fields — e.g. NAICS’s `code`/`level`/`trilateral`, or a country’s `alpha2`/`alpha3`/`numeric`.

A worked item

{
  "value": "01001",
  "displayValue": "Autauga County",
  "description": "Alabama",
  "aliases": [
    "01001",
    "Autauga County"
  ],
  "metadata": {
    "fips": "01001",
    "stateFips": "01",
    "usps": "AL"
  },
  "ancestors": [
    {
      "value": "AL",
      "displayValue": "Alabama"
    }
  ]
}

Query it

/v1/query?key=YOUR_PUBLISHABLE_KEY&q=autauga

The publishable key above is a public, browser-safe identifier — never a secret.

Download

The licence above permits redistributing the compiled list as a file. Download U.S. Counties as JSON.

API reference: query