To find out what county you’re in, check your position against official boundaries. That’s what What county am I in? does: allow your location and it tells you the county, the state, the city or town and the ZIP code, using Census Bureau boundaries. If you have an address or coordinates from Google Maps, the process is the same. Below are the three methods and why the city name on an address, or its ZIP code, can mislead you.
With your location
- Open What county am I in? on your phone or computer.
- When your browser asks, allow location.
- Read the result: county (with its FIPS code), state, city or town and ZIP code.
- If you’re within a short distance of a county line, the tool warns you: given your GPS accuracy, you could be on either side.
No sign-up, nothing to install. If you’d rather not share your location, tap the spot on the map and you get the same answer.
With an address
To find the county of an address (a house you’re looking at, a business, a relative’s place):
- Open County lookup by address.
- Type the street, number and city.
- Pick the address from the list. You get the spot on the map and, below it, the county and the state.
The Census Bureau has its own free tool for this too: the Census Geocoder, under “Find Geographies”, returns the county, census tract and other areas for an address or a pair of coordinates.
With coordinates from Google Maps
Google Maps gives you the coordinates of any spot, even where there’s no street address (a trailhead, a field, a lake):
- In Google Maps on a computer, right-click the spot. The first line of the menu is its coordinates: click to copy them. On a phone, touch and hold the spot and copy them from the search box (Android) or the place sheet (iPhone).
- Open Coordinates to state and paste them.
- Read the state and the county.
If the spot is outside any city or town, you’ll see “Unincorporated area”: it isn’t part of any municipality and the county governs it directly. That’s common in the US: millions of people live in unincorporated areas.
State, county, city and ZIP code
They’re four different things, one inside another, and the ZIP code doesn’t follow the rules:
- State: 50, plus the District of Columbia.
- County: 3,144 counties and county equivalents. Louisiana has parishes; Alaska has boroughs and census areas; Virginia has 38 independent cities that belong to no county.
- City or town: incorporated places with their own government. A city can sit in several counties.
- ZIP code: a set of mail delivery routes, drawn for the postal service, not along county or city lines.
That’s why the city in a mailing address doesn’t always match the city you live in. Plenty of addresses carry the name of a nearby city because that’s where the post office is, even though the home is in an unincorporated area or another town. For taxes, voting, schools and permits, what counts is the actual jurisdiction.
Why the ZIP code isn’t enough
It’s tempting to go by ZIP code, but it fails in both directions:
- A big county has many ZIP codes. Los Angeles County has hundreds.
- One ZIP code can span several counties, and a few even cross state lines.
- ZIP codes aren’t areas for the postal service: they’re delivery routes. The Census Bureau draws ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs) to approximate them, and that’s what Mapsfera shows, with a note.
If what you need is the ZIP code itself, use What is my ZIP code?, or the official USPS ZIP Code Lookup for a mailing address.
Odd cases
The US map has a few quirks that trip up any lookup:
- Cities that are also counties. San Francisco, Denver and Philadelphia are each a city and a county at once.
- New York City is five counties, one per borough: New York, Kings, Queens, Bronx and Richmond.
- Independent cities. In Virginia, cities like Richmond or Alexandria are outside any county; so are Baltimore, St. Louis and Carson City.
- Indian reservations can span several counties, and even states, with their own government.
In all these cases, the right answer is the one from the official boundaries, which is what the tool uses, not the name on a road sign.
See the whole county
To see a county on the map with all its cities and towns, open County map with cities. And to find out how high your town sits, continue with how to find the elevation of any place.