Texas County Map with All 254 Counties and Population
| County | Population | Land area | Polygon area | Difference | Density | Share of state |
|---|
County boundaries and land area: United States Census Bureau, TIGERweb, public domain. Population: 2020 Census of Population and Housing. County seats: Wikipedia. Aerial imagery: United States Geological Survey, The National Map, public domain.
How to use this map
Pick a map type along the top and the map redraws. Counties colours all 254 so no two neighbours share a fill, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, Satellite swaps the flat colours for real imagery of the state, 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: population, land area, density and county seat.
County names are drawn where there is room for them. In a state with 254 counties, some in the east are too small at this scale to label without printing one name on top of another, so the label is dropped rather than made illegible. Clicking still identifies every county, and the table lists all of them.
Why Texas has 254 counties
No other state comes close. Georgia is second with 159 and Virginia third with 133. Delaware has three.
The usual explanation is the one that holds up: counties were laid out in the nineteenth century so a farmer could ride to the county seat, do business at the courthouse and ride home in a day. That put a practical ceiling on how large a county could sensibly be, and Texas is very large. The result is a grid across the plains that looks surveyed rather than settled, which it largely was.
What the day ride logic did not anticipate is how unevenly people would end up distributed. Loving County in the far west has 64 residents across 1,732 square kilometres. It is still a full county with a courthouse, and it still appears on this map as an equal unit beside Harris County, which holds 4.7 million people.
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. County seats come from the published county list.
The check that matters is the total. The 254 county populations sum to 29,145,505, the published state figure, and the land areas sum to 676,660 square kilometres, matching the state total to the square metre. If a set of Texas county figures does not reach those totals, it is mixing census years or dropping counties, and both are easy to do without noticing when there are 254 rows.
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 rather than a single day, 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. Both then sit in the same projection, which is why the coast and the Rio Grande follow the county boundaries instead of drifting away from them.
Texas is one of the more rewarding states to view this way, because the change in land cover is so pronounced. The Chihuahuan Desert in the far west reads as pale tan, the Edwards Plateau as a mottled band through the centre, and the Piney Woods in the east as dark green. The line where the Great Plains give way to the wetter east runs roughly north to south through the middle of the state and is visible without any help from the boundaries.
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 Harris County, which contains Houston.
The Census Bureau gives it 4,731,145 people and 4,422 square kilometres of land. Divide one by the other:
4,731,145 divided by 4,422 equals 1,069.9 people per square kilometre.
Select Harris and the Selection panel reads 1069.9. Switch to imperial and it becomes 2,771.1 per square mile.
The panel also shows a second density computed on the polygon area rather than the land area, and for Harris the two differ by about four percent because the drawn boundary includes water. Every density quoted on this page is the land one.
What the numbers show
Seven counties hold half of Texas: Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar, Travis, Collin and Denton. Between them they cover 2.8 percent of the land. The other 247 counties hold the remaining half across the other 97 percent.
The density range is extreme even by the standards of large states. Dallas County runs at 1,155.6 people per square kilometre, Harris at 1,069.9 and Tarrant at 941.7. At the other end, Loving County runs at 0.037, Kenedy at 0.093 and King at 0.112. Dallas is roughly thirty thousand times denser than Loving.
Eight counties have fewer than a thousand residents each, and together they hold 4,250 people. Brewster County, the largest by area at 16,016 square kilometres, is bigger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined and holds 9,546 people.
Texas as a whole sits at 43.1 people per square kilometre, a little above the national figure of 36.2, which is a reminder that state averages tell you very little in a state shaped like this one.
Mistakes that catch people out
Mixing census years. County populations from different vintages look identical on the page and only reveal themselves when the total misses 29,145,505. Every figure here is 2020.
Treating the drawn area as land. Every county outline includes its inland water, and along the Gulf coast that matters. Harris County encloses about four percent more area than its land figure. Densities here are always computed on land.
Confusing a city with its county. Houston sits mostly in Harris County but spills into Fort Bend and Montgomery. San Antonio is in Bexar County, which is not obvious from the name.
Assuming counties are the unit of local government everywhere. Much of Texas lives in unincorporated territory with no municipal government at all, which is why maps of Texas cities leave large areas blank. The county is often the only local authority.
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.
- Rhode Island County Map: the opposite extreme, five counties in the smallest state.
- 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.