Rhode Island County Map with Cities, Towns and Density

How to use this map

Pick a map type along the top and the map redraws. Counties colours the five counties so no two neighbours share a fill, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, Cities places all thirty nine municipalities, Satellite swaps the flat colours for real imagery, and Blank outline gives you black on white for printing. Click any county, or any row in the table, and its figures appear in the Selection panel.

Switch between metric and imperial with the Units control. Everything follows it, including the downloads.

Rhode Island counties do not govern anything

This is the first thing to know about a county map of Rhode Island, and it makes the state unusual. Rhode Island abolished county government in 1846. The five counties still exist as lines on a map and as units the Census Bureau reports against, but there is no county council, no county administration and no county seat in any working sense.

What actually governs Rhode Island is its thirty nine municipalities: eight cities and thirty one towns, each with its own council. Every square metre of the state belongs to one of them. That is why the Cities layer here shows all thirty nine rather than a selection of the largest, and why they tile the state completely instead of appearing as scattered dots.

Connecticut went further and stopped using counties for statistics altogether, replacing them with nine planning regions in 2022. Rhode Island kept the county lines for reporting, which is why this map still works.

Where the data comes from

Boundaries and land areas come from the United States Census Bureau through the TIGERweb service. Populations are 2020 Census counts.

The figures here are checked two ways, which is worth explaining because it is the reason to trust them. The five county populations sum to 1,097,379, the published state total. Separately, the thirty nine municipal populations also sum to 1,097,379, and the municipalities in each county sum to that county's own figure, in all five cases exactly. Two independent sets of numbers agreeing at both levels is a much stronger check than either one on its own.

Land areas sum to 2,677.77 square kilometres, which is the published figure for the state.

Aerial imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

The Satellite map type replaces the flat county colours with real aerial imagery from the United States Geological Survey, taken from The National Map. It is a cloud free composite, so the whole state is visible at once.

The imagery arrives as a plain latitude and longitude grid while this map is drawn in Lambert conformal conic, so every pixel is converted back to a latitude and longitude and the matching pixel is read from the source image. That puts both in the same projection, which is why the coastline follows the county boundaries instead of sliding away from them.

Narragansett Bay is the thing to look at. It cuts into the state so deeply that the imagery reads almost as two land masses joined at the north. You can also make out the built up corridor running from Providence south west toward Warwick, against the wooded western half of the state.

The imagery is public domain. It is public domain as work of the United States government, and the credit is drawn onto the map itself so it travels with the image when you download it.

A check you can repeat on paper

Take Providence County.

The Census Bureau gives it 660,741 people and 1,060.79 square kilometres of land. Divide one by the other:

660,741 divided by 1,060.79 equals 623.0 people per square kilometre.

Select Providence and the Selection panel reads 623.0. Switch to imperial and it becomes 1,613.6 per square mile.

Now add the five land areas in the table. They come to 2,677.77 square kilometres. Add the populations and you get 1,097,379.

What the numbers show

Providence County holds 60.2 percent of Rhode Islanders on 39.6 percent of the land. Nothing else comes close: Kent is next at 15.5 percent of the population, then Washington at 11.8, Newport at 7.8 and Bristol at 4.6.

The densest county is not Providence though. Bristol County, the smallest county in the smallest state at 62 square kilometres, runs at 812.7 people per square kilometre against Providence at 623.0. Washington County, in the rural south west, runs at 152.2.

Rhode Island as a whole sits at 409.8 people per square kilometre. Only New Jersey is denser among the states, at 487.6. The District of Columbia is far denser again at 4,355, but it is a city rather than a state. For scale, the United States as a whole runs at 36.2, so Rhode Island is about eleven times the national figure.

Mistakes that catch people out

Looking for a county seat. There are none in any functional sense, because county government was abolished in 1846. Lists that name one are usually reporting where a courthouse sits.

Treating the drawn area as land. This matters more in Rhode Island than almost anywhere. Newport County encloses about 67 percent water, Bristol County 46 percent and Washington County 41 percent, because Narragansett Bay and the Atlantic fall inside their boundaries. Every density on this page is computed on land area, not on the area you see drawn, and the Selection panel shows both.

Confusing Providence the city with Providence County. The city holds 190,934 people, the county 660,741. The county also contains Cranston, Pawtucket, East Providence, Woonsocket and a dozen more municipalities.

Assuming a town is smaller than a city. In Rhode Island the labels are legal categories rather than size rankings. Several towns are larger than several cities.

Related Calculators and Reference

• United States Map: all fifty states and the District of Columbia with satellite imagery, cities and rivers.
• US State Maps: every state with its capital, population, land area, density and county count.
• Canada Map: the same treatment for all thirteen provinces and territories.
• United States Census Bureau, Geography: the source of the boundaries and land areas used here.
• The National Map viewer: the USGS browser behind the aerial imagery on this page.

County boundaries and land area: United States Census Bureau, TIGERweb, public domain. Population: 2020 Census of Population and Housing. Aerial imagery: United States Geological Survey, The National Map, public domain.