What county am I in?

Why your county matters

Your county decides a lot of everyday things: where you register to vote and report for jury duty, which sheriff and courts cover you, your property tax bill and part of your sales tax, building permits, and where to get a marriage license, a birth certificate or a copy of a deed.

It also matters when something goes wrong. The National Weather Service names the counties under each tornado, flood or winter storm warning, and burn bans, boil-water notices and evacuation orders usually go out county by county. If you don’t know your county, those alerts are hard to read.

It’s easy to cross a county line without noticing, especially in big metro areas. Los Angeles County alone has 88 cities, and plenty of places people call “Los Angeles” are in other cities or in no city at all.

How we find it

Your device gives us a position: GPS on a phone, usually good to a few yards, or Wi-Fi and IP on a laptop, which can be off by a few hundred. We send that point once to TIGERweb, the U.S. Census Bureau’s official boundary service, and it tells us which state, county, city and ZIP code area the point falls in. Then we draw the county outline so you can see how close the line is.

Under the county you’ll see its FIPS code, the city (or “Unincorporated area” when the spot isn’t inside any city or town), the ZIP code area and the nearest street address. Short distances, like your GPS accuracy, are shown in feet and miles.

Spots we checked

These are the answers TIGERweb gave for a few well-known places on October 31, 2026. Several of them surprise people, which is exactly why a lookup like this is useful.

Points used: 34.05223, -118.24368; 33.8121, -117.9190; 36.1126, -115.1767; 34.1381, -118.3534; 29.9584, -90.0644; 38.6247, -90.1848; 61.2163, -149.8949; 41.7640, -72.6822.

Not every county is called a county

The Census Bureau counts 3,144 counties and county equivalents in the 50 states and D.C., and the tool shows whichever one applies. 2,999 of them are plain counties. The rest go by other names:

• Louisiana has 64 parishes instead of counties.
• Alaska has 30 county equivalents: boroughs (some called “city and borough”, like Juneau), census areas for the parts with no borough government, and two municipalities, Anchorage and Skagway.
• There are 41 independent cities that belong to no county: 38 in Virginia, plus Baltimore, St. Louis and Carson City.
• Since 2022, Connecticut’s eight old counties have been replaced in Census data by nine planning regions, so in Hartford you’ll see “Capitol Planning Region”.
• The District of Columbia is its own county equivalent, and so is each of Puerto Rico’s 78 municipios.

Edge cases

Unincorporated land. Much of the US isn’t inside any city. The Las Vegas Strip is in Paradise, an unincorporated community that Clark County governs directly, and the spot we checked at Universal Studios Hollywood isn’t in any city either. The county is then your local government for roads, police and permits.

Cities in more than one county. Kansas City, Missouri, spreads over four counties: downtown is in Jackson County, while Kansas City International Airport is in Platte County. Atlanta sits in Fulton and DeKalb, and New York City is five counties, one per borough.

Water. The Great Lakes are divided between counties too: a point in the middle of Lake Michigan at 43.5, -87.0 is in Oceana County, Michigan. Out at sea beyond state waters, like 39.5, -73.6 off the New Jersey coast, there’s no county at all, and the tool says you’re at sea.

Near a line. The tool doesn’t warn you about a nearby county line in the US, so zoom in on the outline: if your accuracy circle crosses it, you could be on either side.

Outside the US

The tool works anywhere. In Spain it shows the municipality, province and autonomous community from the official IGN boundaries (there’s a separate “What municipality am I in?” tool for Spain); elsewhere, the county or district from OpenStreetMap, which is useful but not official.