Random US County
Pick random US counties for research, trivia, or dataset demos. Generate multiple entries, choose quantity, and use letter filters to refine results.
Random US County
How this random US county generator works
Press Generate and you get a county. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.
Los Angeles. Cook. Harris. Maricopa. San Diego. And Orleans Parish, which is not a county at all.
That last one turns out to be the most interesting thing about American local government.
Six states are not divided into counties
Forty-four of the fifty states are carved entirely into counties. The other six are the reason the Census Bureau had to invent a phrase.
- Louisiana has 64 parishes, a name inherited from French and Spanish colonial administration, when the civil divisions followed the Catholic Church's. They do the job a county does.
- Alaska has 19 organized boroughs and no counties at all.
- Virginia has 95 counties and 38 independent cities, which sit outside any county.
- Maryland, Missouri and Nevada are all-county, except that each has exactly one independent city: Baltimore, St. Louis, and Carson City.
The Census Bureau's term for all of these is county equivalent. Add them up and the United States has roughly 3,143 counties and county equivalents, a number that shifts by one or two depending on who is counting and when.
The range is wider than you would expect. Delaware has three counties. Texas has 254.
The place where nobody is in charge
Nearly half the land area of Alaska lies outside any organized borough. This region is larger than France and Germany combined. It is officially called the Unorganized Borough, and it has no county-level government of any kind.
Which presents a problem, and the problem is not political. It is a spreadsheet problem.
The Census Bureau needs a row. Every county in America is a row: population, land area, housing units, median income. An area the size of two European countries cannot simply be a hole in the table.
So the Census Bureau, working with the State of Alaska, drew eleven lines through the Unorganized Borough and called the pieces census areas. They elect nobody. They tax nobody. They have no offices and no seal.
The Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area is the largest county equivalent in the United States by land area. It is not a thing. It is a shape drawn so that a number would have somewhere to live.
That is what an administrative division is. Not a place. A container for a measurement.
Some counties have no government at all
Alaska is the extreme case, not the only one.
The counties of Connecticut and Rhode Island, and eight of Massachusetts's fourteen, have no governmental power. They exist as legal and geographical entities. Nobody is elected to run them. The work is done by towns, or by the state.
It went further in Connecticut. In 2022 the Census Bureau formally stopped using the state's eight counties for statistical purposes and began using its nine councils of government instead. The counties still exist on the map. They no longer exist in the data.
A county, then, is not one kind of object. In Texas it is a government with a courthouse and a sheriff. In Rhode Island it is a word. In Alaska it is a line drawn by statisticians. All three are counties, and the census counts them all the same way.
A county name is not an identifier
American county names repeat, constantly, and this catches out everybody who tries to build a database from them.
Washington, Jefferson and Franklin each name counties in state after state. There is an Orange County in California and an Orange County in Florida, and they have nothing to do with each other. Richmond names more than one. Jefferson names a county in Kentucky, a county in Alabama, and a parish in Louisiana.
Which is why the federal government does not use the names. Every county and county equivalent has a five-digit FIPS code: two digits for the state, three for the county. Los Angeles County is 06037 and nothing else is.
The names are for people. The codes are for machines. Any system that treats a county name as a primary key will, sooner or later, merge two American places that are two thousand miles apart, and it will do it silently.
Ways people actually use this
- Test data. Good for a form. Pair each name with a state, because the name alone does not identify anything.
- Quizzes. Show the county, ask for the state. Then ask which state it might be, and watch the room realise.
- Teaching data modelling. Ask a class to make county name the primary key. Then show them Jefferson.
- Writing. American fiction runs on counties. The sheriff, the courthouse, the county line.
- Curiosity. Look up how many people live in the Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area. Then look at its size.
Getting more out of the filters
- Type Parish into Contains for the Louisiana entries, which are counties under a different name.
- Type County for everything else.
- Type a bracketed code such as (NJ) or (RI) to find the entries where a name clash has been disambiguated.
- Starts with and Ends with compare a single character. Ends with is nearly useless here, since almost everything ends in y.
Questions people ask
How many counties are there in the United States?
Roughly 3,143 counties and county equivalents, though published figures vary by a few depending on whether territories, the District of Columbia and recent changes in Connecticut are included.
Why does Louisiana have parishes?
The name is inherited from the French and Spanish colonial period, when local administration followed the boundaries of Catholic Church parishes. Louisiana's 64 parishes function as counties.
Does Alaska have counties?
No. It has 19 organized boroughs, and nearly half its land area falls in the Unorganized Borough, which has no county-level government. The Census Bureau divides that area into 11 census areas purely for statistics.
Which state has the most counties?
Texas, with 254. Delaware has the fewest, with three.
Can a county have no government?
Yes. Counties in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and most of those in Massachusetts, have no county government. They persist as geographic and legal areas while the actual work is done by towns or by the state.
References
Skanda Aryal is a full stack engineer focused on accessible web experiences, with personal interests in time zones, travel, hiking, and geography. His enjoys playing with utilities tied to movement, schedules, places, and time based coordination. At Eon Tools, he reviews geography, transportation, times now, and date and time tools.