US county map

Paste a table of counties and numbers, by FIPS code or by name, and get a map with every county coloured by its value, with a legend you can download.

How to use it

  1. Paste one county per line with its number, or upload a CSV. Use the five-digit FIPS code or "County, ST".
  2. Press Draw the map.
  3. Choose the colour ramp, the classes and the breaks.
  4. Hover a county for its value. Download the map as PNG.

5 practical uses

  1. Map health, election, income or population data by county.
  2. Show a service area or sales figures at county level.
  3. Illustrate a news story with county data.
  4. Compare counties within a state on a metric.
  5. Produce a figure for a report without GIS software.

The maths behind it

Values are put into classes by quantiles (equal counts), equal intervals (equal steps over the range) or natural breaks (the Jenks method, which minimises the variance within classes by dynamic programming). Names are matched to FIPS codes through an index of county names and states; each class takes one colour of the ramp.

Notes

The boundaries are the Census Bureau's 3,200-odd counties and equivalents (parishes in Louisiana, boroughs in Alaska, independent cities in Virginia) at 1:10m. A county named without its state cannot be placed, since many names repeat; add the state. Counties without data stay grey. The sample colours the counties by an estimate of their population from the ZIP code data built into these tools.

For the fifty states, the state map is quicker.

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Questions and answers

Where do I get county FIPS codes?

The county lookup tool gives the code for any county. Most census and health datasets carry them already.

Why did some rows not match?

A county name without a state cannot be placed, since many names repeat. Add the state code, or use the FIPS code.

What does the sample show?

An estimate of each county's population from the ZIP code data bundled with these tools.

Embed this tool on your website

Paste this code where the tool should appear. It shows the tool alone, without this page's text, and links back here. It is free to use; the map data credit stays on the map.

<iframe src="https://waymorphic.com/tools/us-county-map?embed=1" width="100%" height="760" style="border:0;border-radius:12px;max-width:100%" loading="lazy" allow="geolocation; fullscreen; clipboard-write" title="US county map – Waymorphic Map"></iframe>

Change height to suit your page. To open the tool with a place already set, add the settings from this page's address bar (the part after #) to the end of the src. The embedded tool asks the visitor's browser for their location only when they press the button, and the allow attribute lets that work inside the frame.