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.

A self-extracting ZIP file (counties_rev1.exe, 131 kb) is available here for download. This file contains the ASCII .txt file described above, as well as electronic copies of these values in Access (.mdb) format. To access the contents of the self-extracting ZIP file, download the file and double-click on the file to run the self extractor. Specify the location where you want the files stored (e.g., C:\Temp), and click Unzip to extract and unzip the files. 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. 

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.

Important Notice:  On February 8, 2005, the NIST announced the withdrawal of 17 FIPS Publications in Federal Register, Volume 70, No. 25 (70 FR 6623) , including FIPS 55-3, Codes for Named Populated Places, Primary County Divisions, and Other Locational Entities of the United States, Puerto Rico, and the Outlying Areas. These FIPS are being withdrawn because they are obsolete, or have not been updated to adopt current voluntary industry standards, current federal data standards, or current good practices for information security.  Work is underway to redesign or transform several of the withdrawn FIPS standards for review and acceptance as ANSI-accredited standards, but it will be a lengthy process.

The existing FIPS 55 guideline is being redesigned by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to use the feature identifier (ID) codes from the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), which never change. The GNIS is the Nation's official geographic names repository and has been designated by the U.S. Board of Geographic Names as the only source of geographic names and locative attributes for use by the Federal Government and its contractors. This new proposed standard will be submitted for approval and accreditation by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Refer to the FIPS 55 PUBLICATION CHANGE NOTICE, effective January 1, 2006, for USGS contact information and details on the proposed standard.

The initial data standard and source data is available here:  County Name

Part 270, FW 6, Data Management and Standards, dated September 30, 2002.

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

FIPS 55 PUBLICATION CHANGE NOTICE, effective January 1, 2006.

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) and Access (.mdb) 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.