Census Gazetteer land and water area
Land and water area for every state, the District of Columbia, and Idaho's 44 counties, as the legal/statistical areas the Census Bureau computes from the TIGER boundaries in effect January 1 of the vintage year. State and national figures come from a separate file in the same release, 2025_Gaz_state_national.zip; the county figures come from 2025_gaz_counties_16.txt.
Publisher
- Organization
- U.S. Census Bureau
- Publisher’s dataset
- Gazetteer Files, 2025 (counties and states)
- File or API used
- https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/maps-data/data/gazetteer/2025_Gazetteer/2025_gaz_counties_16.txt
- Retrieval script
scripts/fetch-census-gazetteer.py- Methodology
- https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/technical-documentation/records-layout/gaz-record-layouts.html
Coverage
- Geography
- Nation's states and DC, and Idaho's 44 counties
- Time coverage
- 2025
- Update frequency
- Annual, with each TIGER vintage
- Published
- September 10, 2025
- Retrieved
- September 10, 2026
- License of the records
- Public domain. U.S. federal government work.
- Rows
- 190 observations, 2025
Measures
| Measure | What it measures | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Land area | Land area of the legal/statistical entity, as the Census Bureau computes it from the TIGER boundary. | square miles |
| Water area | Water area of the legal/statistical entity, as the Census Bureau computes it from the TIGER boundary. | square miles |
Caveats
- Area follows the legal boundary vintage in effect January 1, 2025, and can change from one vintage to the next when a boundary is corrected, even where nothing changed on the ground.
- ALAND_SQMI and AWATER_SQMI are derived by the Census Bureau from ALAND and AWATER, which it measures in square meters; this dataset stores the square-mile figure as the Bureau prints it, to three decimals.
- The 2025 state/national file carries no United States total row, so no nation-level observation is stored; Puerto Rico is excluded because it is not in data/geographies.json.
How to cite
Understand Idaho, “Gazetteer Files, 2025 (counties and states)”, compiled from U.S. Census Bureau, Gazetteer Files, 2025 (counties and states). Retrieved September 10, 2026. https://understandidaho.com/data/census-gazetteer/.
Cite U.S. Census Bureau directly for the figures themselves.
This page was last updated .