County area rankings
One country, very different boundaries. Explore the largest and smallest county equivalents, then see why the measurement and comparison group change the story.
Choose the question you want to answer
Each view uses a stated measurement and the same pinned source release.
Largest land area
All counties and county equivalents, including Alaska and Puerto Rico, ranked by land area. Alaska’s boroughs and census areas are included because they serve the same statistical level as counties.
Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area, AK145,767.5 mi²Explore ranking →Smallest land area
The smallest county equivalents by land area. Independent cities appear alongside counties, so small city jurisdictions can rank ahead of rural counties.
Falls Church city, VA2 mi²Explore ranking →Outside Alaska
County equivalents in the other 49 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, ordered by land area. This view separates Alaska’s exceptionally large statistical regions from the rest of the dataset.
San Bernardino County, CA20,068.4 mi²Explore ranking →Largest total area
Rankings include both Census land and water measurements. Water can change the order substantially, especially for coastal counties and counties bordering the Great Lakes.
Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area, AK147,878.2 mi²Explore ranking →Highest water share
The percentage of each county equivalent’s published square-mile total that is water. A high percentage reflects water assigned to the statistical geography, not necessarily lakes entirely enclosed by its land boundary.
Culebra Municipio, PR93.1% waterExplore ranking →The typical county is far from the national extreme
The median county-equivalent land area is 604.5 square miles in this release. The mean is 1,097.8 square miles. These answer different questions: the median identifies the middle of the size distribution, while the mean divides all recorded county land equally among the 3,222 records.
Very large entries pull the mean upward. The ten largest equivalents alone account for 12.8% of the combined land area in the dataset. That is a sum of county records including Puerto Rico, not a population-weighted statistic or a separately published national area. A county selected at random is not the same thing as the county containing a randomly selected resident or acre.
Counts use published land square miles. Bars share one scale; percentages use all 3,222 records. Every county equivalent belongs to exactly one band.
This distribution is a better starting point for a “typical county” discussion than the first row of a leaderboard. If your question concerns a particular state, open its state directory for a within-state median and range. Regional differences can disappear when all states are reduced to one national summary.
Three patterns worth investigating
Alaska changes the top of the table
Alaska supplies 21 of the 100 largest county equivalents by land. Outside Alaska, San Bernardino County, California leads with 20,068.4 square miles. Removing Alaska changes the comparison group; it does not change any county’s measurement.
The outside-Alaska view still includes Hawaii and Puerto Rico. It is not a contiguous-U.S. filter. Investigate Alaska’s effect →
Water can move a county hundreds of places
Keweenaw County, Michigan ranks #1,935 by land and #67 by total area. Its 5,426.2 water square miles change the comparison substantially. A high total-area rank does not mean that the county has correspondingly more land.
Water share asks a third question: what fraction of the county’s combined area is water? It does not rank the absolute amount of water. See the worked comparisons →
The smallest entries include independent cities
The smallest-area table compares all county equivalents, including compact independent cities and municipios. The first entry is Falls Church city, Virginia, at 2.046 land square miles. Its classification matters as much as its size.
A list restricted to names ending in “County” would answer a different question and omit some other equivalents. Explore the smallest-county story →
Which ranking should you use?
| Your question | Best starting point | What it does not establish |
|---|---|---|
| Which county equivalents contain the most land? | Largest land area | Population, usable building land, or accessible land |
| How small can a county-level jurisdiction be? | Smallest land area | A ranking of every incorporated city |
| What leads after excluding Alaska? | Outside Alaska | A filter limited to the contiguous states |
| How large is the complete measured geography? | Largest total area | A land-only comparison |
| Which geography has the greatest water fraction? | Highest water share | The most water square miles, rainfall, or flood risk |
How to read a rank without overstating it
Land rankings use original ALAND square meters, total-area rankings use ALAND plus AWATER, and water-share rankings use published water square miles divided by the published total. Exact ties are ordered by GEOID and receive sequential positions. Rounded values can look tied even when their underlying measurements differ.
A rank is an ordinal position, not a size ratio. The gap between first and second can be much greater than the gap between two neighboring entries farther down the list. Each ranking page reports its measurement range and the states represented; open a pair in Compare to see the actual difference. Position alone cannot tell you whether two counties are nearly the same size.
For a reproducible citation, retain the measurement, release year, and coverage. “Land-area rank in the 2026 US County Area dataset, including Puerto Rico” is more specific than “the 200th largest county.” When comparing releases, investigate changes in geography and coverage before interpreting movement in rank as a physical change in area.