Deer Lodge County area

Population and density of Deer Lodge County

The Census Bureau estimates that 9,709 people lived in Deer Lodge County on July 1, 2025. That ranks #2,506 of 3,222 county equivalents nationally and #24 of 56 in Montana. Since the April 1, 2020 estimates base of 9,427, the population has grown by 282 (+3%), compared with +5.6% for Montana as a whole.

With 736.7 square miles of land, that is 13 people per square mile (5.1 per km²), placing Deer Lodge County #2,526 nationally for density and #10 in Montana. The median county equivalent has 47 people per square mile; the Montana median is 2.8. Put another way, there are about 49 acres of land per resident.

U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 population estimates. Estimates are revised each year and are not decennial census counts. Density divides the whole population by the whole county’s land area, so it describes an average, not how settlement is distributed within the county. Population sources and methods.

Cities and towns in Deer Lodge County

Every resident of Deer Lodge County lives within Anaconda-Deer Lodge County. The city and the county equivalent cover the same territory, 736.7 square miles of land in the 2026 place Gazetteer, so there are no separate towns or unincorporated areas to list.

Metropolitan area

Deer Lodge County is not part of any metropolitan or micropolitan statistical area in the Office of Management and Budget’s July 2023 delineation; 1,306 other county equivalents are also outside one. These areas are built around an urban core of at least 10,000 people plus the counties tied to it by commuting, so counties outside them are generally rural.

ZIP codes

5 ZIP Code Tabulation Areas have land in Deer Lodge County; 3 of them have most of their land inside the county, and the others mainly cover neighboring areas.

5970159711597225975659762

ZIP Code Tabulation Areas are the Census Bureau’s approximations of USPS ZIP Code service areas, from the 2020 Census relationship files. Lighter codes have less than half of their land in this county. Post-office-box and single-address ZIP Codes have no tabulation area.

Counties bordering Deer Lodge County

Deer Lodge County shares a land border with 5 county equivalents. It has more land than 1 of them. The largest neighbor is Beaverhead County (5,542.7 mi²) and the smallest is Silver Bow County (718 mi²). Together with its neighbors, Deer Lodge County forms a block of 12,707.6 mi² of land, of which it holds 5.8%.

How big is Deer Lodge County compared with U.S. states?

Deer Lodge County has less land than any of the 50 states. Rhode Island, the smallest state by land area, has 1,033.9 mi², about 1.4 times as much. Montana’s county land could hold about 198 areas the size of Deer Lodge County.

Another way to picture it: the same land area would fill a square about 27.1 miles (43.7 km) on each side. Real county shapes are rarely square, so this is a scale reference rather than a width or driving distance.

State figures are the sums of each state’s county-equivalent land measurements in the same Census release, so states and counties are compared on the same basis. Published state totals can differ slightly because of rounding. Compare all states · Counties bigger than entire states.

What stands out about Deer Lodge County?

Deer Lodge County has more land than 2,020 of the other 3,221 county equivalents in the dataset.

A median is the middle county-equivalent measurement, not the average of the largest and smallest. All three bars use the same linear scale. Very small areas may appear as a thin sliver; the labels retain their values.

Does including water change its rank?

Using land plus water places Deer Lodge County at #1,297 nationally by total area, 95 places farther from the top than its land rank. Other county equivalents gain more area when their water measurements are included.

Its water share is 0.6%, compared with a national county-equivalent median of 1.2% — 0.5 percentage points lower. This describes the statistical geography’s land/water mix, not flood exposure or developable land.

Closest positions in the national land ranking

These entries sit immediately beside Deer Lodge County in the national ranking. They can be in different states and are not necessarily geographic neighbors.

Calculated from the same Census release as the area table. Total-area order uses original ALAND + AWATER; water shares and chart labels use published square miles. Calculation details.