The following entities are considered to be equivalent to counties for legal and statistical purposes: The parishes of Louisiana; the boroughs and census areas of Alaska; the District of Columbia; the independent cities of Maryland, Missouri, Nevada, and Virginia; the portion of Yellowstone National Park in Montana; and various entities in the possessions and associated areas.

The ASCII .txt file, as well as electronic copies of the values in Access (.mdb) and dBASE III (.dbf) formats, are also available here for download. The .txt, .mdb, and .dbf files are zipped using PKZip. If you need a copy, PKZip is available for download by clicking here (pkzipdoc.exe). Some browsers may require the user to right-click on the hyperlink text with the mouse, left-click on "Select Target As" or "Save Link As" from the dialog box menu, and save the zipped file to the appropriate user directory. These electronic copies are current as of July 19, 2000. 

Related information is also available. For electronic copies of codes for named populated places, primary county divisions (such as townships and census county divisions), American Indian and Alaska Native areas, and several kinds of facilities, visit the Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 55-3, 1994 December 28, "Codes for Named Populated Places, Primary County Divisions, and Other Locational Entities of the United States, Puerto Rico, and the Outlying Areas." Flat ASCII files, zip files, tar files, and text files of the FIPS 55 codes for the 50 States, Washington, D.C., and nine outlying areas are available for download or printing from this site.

Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 6-4, "Counties and Equivalent Entities of the United States, Its Possessions, and Associated Areas" dated August 31, 1990.

To ensure compliance with the Service Information and Technology Architecture (SITA), Service staff are strongly encouraged to utilize this data element in existing systems, data sets, databases, and information applications. Where existing systems and data-related items are not in compliance, they should be modified to achieve compatibility and implement this data standard.

Counties in different states can have the same name. Therefore, in data systems concerned with the identification of counties in more than one State, the county names must be used in conjunction with the full State name and/or its corresponding two-letter alpha code.

The Service data standard for State Name and Alpha Code can be viewed at this site. It references the full State names and unique two-letter FIPS alphabetic codes for representing the 50 States, the District of Columbia and the outlying areas of the United States, and associated areas. It also provides electronic copies of these values for download in ASCII (.txt), Access (.mdb), and dbase III (.dbf) formats.

County names, State names, and the two-letter State alphabetic codes will be handled as separate data fields in any new or modified automated system, and will not be combined in a single data field.