Washington County, Rhode Island Map with Towns and Population

How to use this map

This is Washington County, drawn as the 9 cities and towns it is divided into. Pick a map type along the top: Cities and towns colours them so no two neighbours share a fill, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, Satellite swaps the flat colours for real imagery, and Blank outline gives you black on white for printing. Click any town, or any row in the table, for its population, land area and density.

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

What this county is made of

Washington County held 129,839 people at the 2020 Census across 853 square kilometres of land, which works out at 152.2 people per square kilometre. Its seat is West Kingston. Within Rhode Island it is third by population out of 5 and second by land area, holding 11.8 percent of the state.

The 9 cities and towns on this map are the units the county is actually administered through, and they cover every square metre of it. South Kingstown is the largest at 31,931 people, and New Shoreham the smallest at 1,410. The cities and towns sum to exactly 129,839, which is how the figures on this page are checked.

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 county seat comes from the published county list for Rhode Island.

Every figure here reconciles twice. The cities and towns add up to the county total, and the county totals across Rhode Island add up to the published state figure. Numbers that only agree at one level usually mean a mix of census years, which is easy to do without noticing because the individual values all look plausible.

Satellite imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

The Satellite map type replaces the flat colours with real aerial imagery from the United States Geological Survey, taken from The National Map. Most of it comes from the National Agriculture Imagery Program, flown at one metre resolution or better.

That resolution matters at this scale. The national and state maps on this site use a NASA composite at five hundred metres per pixel, which is right for a whole country but turns to mush over a single county. At one metre you can pick out reservoirs, the road network, the line where development gives way to woodland, and the shape of built up areas within each town.

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. Both then sit in the same projection, which is why the town boundaries follow the ground instead of drifting away from it.

The imagery is public domain, as work of the United States government. 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 South Kingstown, the largest town here.

The Census Bureau gives it 31,931 people and 146.0 square kilometres of land. Divide one by the other and you get 218.7 people per square kilometre.

Select it on the map and the Selection panel reads the same figure. Add the 9 land areas in the table and they come to 853 square kilometres, the published land area of Washington County.

Mistakes that catch people out

Treating the drawn area as land. The county outline includes its inland water, and here the boundary encloses about 71 percent more area than the land figure. Density on this page is always computed on land.

Confusing the county with the place that shares its name. West Kingston is the seat of Washington County, not the whole of it, and the county contains 8 other cities and towns besides.

Mixing census years. Every population here is 2020. If a set of figures for Washington County does not sum to 129,839, it is carrying more than one vintage.

Related Calculators and Reference

• Rhode Island County Map: all 5 counties of Rhode Island with population, land area and density.
• United States Map: all fifty states, with a county map behind each one.
• 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.

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.