Talk:List of the most populous counties in the United States

List of the most populous counties in the United States is a featured list, which means it has been identified as one of the best lists produced by the Wikipedia community. If you can update or improve it, please do so.

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February 5, 2008	Featured list candidate	Promoted

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Untitled

This list in inaccurate. Most counties in NV are bigger than Clark including Nye — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.10.36.223 (talk) 21:09, 25 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Why is Denver not listed? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.35.36.132 (talk) 23:51, 4 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It would be great to add the population densities to this table. Does anyone know a good source for these? I tried to get an ranked list out of the census tool, and couldn't figure it out.

You can get them off each county's wikipedia article. Don't know how long that would take though. But I agree that they should be in. Dflav1138 (talk) 00:43, 29 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

who the fuck is changing my edit that the county seat of queens county is in Kew Gardens, Queens. The courthouse is NOT in jamaica nor is it close. The court house is in fact located on Queens Boulevard and 82nd avenue (within the boundaries of Kew gardens. Dont leave me messages about anything regarding Queens or ANYTHING in Queens county fucking wikiphile shit heads. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 162.83.174.251 (talk • contribs)

Ah, isn't it refreshing to see a demonstration of the importance of charm and civility in human relationships?!? The Queens article states (with sources) that Jamaica is the county seat, that some borough offices spill over into Kew Gardens, and that both Jamaica and Kew Gardens are in the town of Jamaica. Anonymous editors who insist that their personal knowledge should prevail over sourced info, and who use profanity and insults to make their points, will be accorded all the respect that their behavior warrants. --Orlady (talk) 03:44, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This article states that two of the counties on the list have consolidated city and county government but doesn't include Marion County Indiana iun that. Marion County has unified government and should be added to that line.

So why aren't the counties in order of population as the title of the page suggests? Im just a little confused. If you look at the 2000 populations, they are all over the board from top to bottom. And how did this list attain FL status with this type of a major issue? Also, why is Montgomery County, Ohio not included? The 2000 Census poulation was 559,062. There are counties on this list with a lesser population such as El paso, Collin, Will, Denton, Bernalillo counties. So this list has multiple issues. Texas141 (talk) 23:10, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

First of all, let me tell you that the current version of this wiki table has been fully macro-generated and sorted using the LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet, meaning that it wasn’t made by hand (except, of course, for the writing of the source code that ended up creating it).

You’re right to some extent when you say that the Bernalillo, Collin, Denton, El Paso and Will counties have a lesser population than the Montgomery County... but that is according to the already “old” 2000 census (which is included in the table to allow absolute and relative growth comparisons). Please also note that southern or southwestern states such as Texas, New Mexico and Colorado have consistently grown faster during the last censuses than northern states like Ohio, Pennsylvania or New York. Some counties within these last ones have lost population (even thousands of inhabitants) between the years 2000 and 2010, and that has precisely what has happened in the case of the Ohioan Montgomery County. In fact, it is not present in the list because it leaped from a population of 559,062 according to the 2000 census to “only” 535,153 inhabitants in 2010, now nationally ranking 118^th (assuming that the more populous Baltimore City and the District of Columbia are county-like entities; if not, it ranks 116^th). And because the number of counties is currently limited to 100 (especially to avoid the DC “county” problem), the “magic number” that limits the addition of more counties is 620,961 (that is, the 2010 population of the county-equivalent Baltimore). So, the “multiple issues” problem you’re talking about just seems to be a mere misunderstanding, most probably due to by the many columns that I added to the article about one month ago.

About this article being shown as a “Featured List”, as you can clearly see in this talk page, it was added on February 5, 2008 (even before I made my very first edits in the English, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese Wikipedias), when the article still looked like this. On the one hand, I only massively updated it for the first time (as you can see in its history page) on March 25, 2011. However, I didn’t think at that time that it was proper to remove the star's template. On the other hand, I believe that the article is better now (although it is naturally more confusing, because not only did I update it with figures from the last two US censuses but I also added much more automatically calculated data or information to the table (including official land areas in both square kilometers and square miles, 2000 and 2010 densities per both sq. km and sq. mi., absolute decennial change and even the counties’ average annual relative change).

In order to make the article less confusing and easier to read and understand at first sight, I have automatically added bold typeface to the 2010 census figures.

I hope to have been helpful. Regards from the Argentinian city of Bahía Blanca (“White Bay”). :-)

MaxBech1975 (talk) 01:59, 30 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

While it is true that most of Marion County does have a consolidated government, there are four cities with the county that are excluded from that government. They are Beech Grove, Lawrence, Southport, and Speedway. All of this is mentioned in Wikipedia's article on Marion County. Therefore, the entire county is not consolidated, according to definition. Backspace (talk) 22:58, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

See Unigov; the excluded towns are still part of Indianapolis, and Greg Ballard is the mayor in all of them as well as in the balance. Nyttend (talk) 15:38, 28 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Inconsistency in photos

I notice that in the current set of pictures the first eight are of the eight largest counties, whereas the ninth and tenth pictures are not. To be consistent, I think that these positions should be photos of Dallas and Queens. Unless completely random photos are allowed, in which case the first eight would appear not to be so. Backspace (talk) 21:26, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

List of counties in the United States on July 1, 2011 Estimate

1. 9,889,056 - Los Angeles County, CA
2. 5,217,080 - Cook County, IL
3. 4,180,894 - Harris County, TX
4. 3,880,244 - Maricopa County, AZ
5. 3,140,069 - San Diego County, CA
6. 3,055,745 - Orange County, CA
7. 2,554,766 - Miami-Dade County, FL
8. 2,532,645 - Kings County, NY
9. 2,416,014 - Dallas County, TX
10. 2,247,848 - Queens County, NY
11. 2,239,620 - Riverside County, CA
12. 2,065,377 - San Bernardino County, CA
13. 1,969,975 - Clark County, NV
14. 1,969,722 - King County, WA
15. 1,849,815 - Tarrant County, TX
16. 1,809,378 - Santa Clara County, CA
17. 1,802,096 - Wayne County, MI
18. 1,780,172 - Broward County, FL
19. 1,756,153 - Bexar County, TX
20. 1,601,948 - New York County, NY
21. 1,536,471 - Philadelphia County, PA
22. 1,529,875 - Alameda County, CA
23. 1,518,171 - Middlesex County, MA
24. 1,498,816 - Suffolk County, NY
25. 1,436,105 - Sacramento County, CA
26. 1,392,002 - Bronx County, NY
27. 1,344,436 - Nassau County, NY
28. 1,335,187 - Palm Beach County, FL
29. 1,270,294 - Cuyahoga County, OH
30. 1,267,775 - Hillsborough County, FL
31. 1,227,066 - Allegheny County, PA
32. 1,210,145 - Oakland County, MI
33. 1,178,799 - Franklin County, OH
34. 1,169,107 - Orange County, FL
35. 1,168,431 - Hennepin County, MN
36. 1,100,692 - Fairfax County, VA
37. 1,066,096 - Contra Costa County, CA
38. 1,063,130 - Travis County, TX
39. 1,048,985 - Salt Lake County, UT
40. 998,692 - St. Louis County, MO
41. 989,794 - Montgomery County, MD
42. 989,569 - Pima County, AZ
43. 963,607 - Honolulu County, HI
44. 955,899 - Westchester County, NY
45. 952,532 - Milwaukee County, WI
46. 949,599 - Fulton County, GA
47. 944,373 - Mecklenburg County, NC
48. 942,904 - Fresno County, CA
49. 935,088 - Shelby County, TN
50. 929,780 - Wake County, NC
51. 925,899 - Fairfield County, CT
52. 923,222 - DuPage County, IL
53. 918,028 - Erie County, NY
54. 917,398 - Pinellas County, FL
55. 911,296 - Marion County, IN
56. 911,004 - Bergen County, NJ
57. 894,705 - Hartford County, CT
58. 871,233 - Prince George's County, MD
59. 870,709 - Duval County, FL
60. 861,113 - New Haven County, CT
61. 851,710 - Kern County, CA
62. 842,145 - Macomb County, MI
63. 831,771 - Ventura County, CA
64. 824,941 - Gwinnett County, GA
65. 820,790 - El Paso County, TX
66. 814,217 - Middlesex County, NJ
67. 812,826 - San Francisco County, CA
68. 812,226 - Collin County, TX
69. 809,941 - Baltimore County, MD
70. 807,904 - Pierce County, WA
71. 804,210 - Montgomery County, PA
72. 801,227 - Worcester County, MA
73. 800,362 - Hamilton County, OH
74. 797,810 - Hidalgo County, TX
75. 785,137 - Essex County, NJ
76. 748,930 - Essex County, MA
77. 748,031 - Multnomah County, OR
78. 746,906 - Jefferson County, KY
79. 745,625 - Monroe County, NY
80. 732,371 - Oklahoma County, OK
81. 730,932 - Suffolk County, MA
82. 727,209 - San Mateo County, CA
83. 722,400 - Snohomish County, WA
84. 706,222 - Lake County, IL
85. 699,893 - DeKalb County, GA
86. 697,553 - Cobb County, GA
87. 696,214 - San Joaquin County, CA
88. 686,406 - Denton County, TX
89. 681,545 - Will County, IL
90. 676,360 - Jackson County, MO
91. 675,436 - Norfolk County, MA
92. 670,968 - Bernalillo County, NM
93. 658,931 - Jefferson County, AL
94. 641,224 - Hudson County, NJ
95. 636,963 - El Paso County, CO
96. 635,475 - Davidson County, TN
97. 631,330 - Lee County, FL
98. 631,020 - Monmouth County, NJ
99. 626,854 - Bucks County, PA
100. 626,709 - Providence County, RI

Please update this edit in article. It has source link to http://www.census.gov/popest/data/counties/totals/2011/tables/CO-EST2011-07.csv Thank You!

Ross Degenstein --208.107.212.115 (talk) 14:04, 9 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

2014 update

I would like to thank the unknown editor who has provided and when necessary re-ranked the 2014 population estimate for the top 20 counties. Could you now provide it for the next 80? Thank you.Amyzex (talk) 21:45, 31 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Why do we have this article?

The information is nearly the same as List of United States counties and county equivalents, in fact, the title is incorrect, it should say 'List of United States counties by population', which is a redirect to this page. The only difference is that this article has population density and area ∼∼∼∼ Eric0928^Talk 12:33, 16 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I would tend to agree with this sentiment, and would propose a merger of sorts between both articles. This article is missing independent cities (plus D.C. as a whole) which would be in the top 100 if they were properly included, while the other article only has a population figure, and not square millage or population density, etc. I would propose that the other article get updated with all that info, while this one is removed. Bobharris1989 (talk) 07:41, 8 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Where's Washington, DC?

The District of Columbia is a consolidated version of the city of Washington, Washington County, and city of Georgetown. It's basically the same as a consolidated city-county or the Virginia independent cities. Shouldn't it be on the list? --AW (talk) 21:29, 3 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The list had not been updated in some time. Most likely, D.C. was not populous enough at the time to qualify. Now that the list is updated, D.C. is included. - Presidentman talk · contribs (Talkback) 21:07, 20 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Columns

Why are there so many columns in this list? Shouldn't the population be enough? - Presidentman talk · contribs (Talkback) 20:15, 15 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Flags

I'd like to add the state flags to that column, similar to how it looks over on List of States list. Any objections? This would help users see visually what states' counties dominate the list, e.g. California. Eplack (talk) 00:50, 19 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Here's an example:

New Jersey Eplack (talk) 00:52, 19 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Westchester not on the map

Westchester county, Ny is not on the map. Denmark45 (talk) 00:37, 6 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

2020 updates?

Should this be updated to reflect 2020 Census data? The largest cities have been updated with 2020 figures 2600:1011:B165:E588:6C9A:620E:B156:DF0C (talk) 22:44, 16 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Nassau County numbers

Nassau County has over 2,000,000 residents. I grew up there. As a matter of fact a few years ago it was reported that Nassau had surpassed Queens in population. Not sure where they got these numbers. Just the fact that it shows Suffolk County on LI having more residents shows how off these numbers are 174.251.64.215 (talk) 02:11, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]