Federal land ownership by state
Congressional Research Service compilation of federal land acreage by state and administering agency, drawn from each agency's own land records, plus each state's total acreage from the GSA Federal Real Property Profile.
Publisher
- Organization
- Congressional Research Service
- Publisher’s dataset
- Federal Land Ownership: Overview and Data, Report R42346
- File or API used
- https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R42346/R42346.18.pdf
- Retrieval script
scripts/fetch-crs-federal-land.py- Methodology
- https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R42346
Coverage
- Geography
- Nation and states (50 states plus the District of Columbia)
- Time coverage
- 2004, 2018
- Update frequency
- Irregular; CRS reissues this report every few years
- Published
- February 21, 2020
- Retrieved
- September 8, 2026
- License
- The compiled file on this page is CC BY 4.0. The underlying records: U.S. federal government work; CRS products are in the public domain.
Measures
| Measure | What it measures | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Federal land | Land administered by the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, or Department of Defense, as of September 30, 2018 (September 30, 2017 for the Department of Defense). | acres |
| Federal land share | Federal acreage administered by the five agencies CRS tabulates, as a percent of the state's total land area, as of September 30, 2018. | percent |
| Total land area | Total land area of the state, from the GSA Federal Real Property Profile as of September 30, 2004, the denominator CRS uses for the federal land share. | acres |
Caveats
- Federal acreage (land.federal_land_acres, land.federal_land_share) is agency records as of September 30, 2018 for the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service, and as of September 30, 2017 for the Department of Defense, which is the FY2018 Base Structure Report baseline CRS used; each Department of Defense observation carries a note to that effect.
- Total state acreage (land.total_acres) is the GSA Federal Real Property Profile figure as of September 30, 2004, which is the denominator CRS divides into to get the federal land share; it is stored under period 2004, five years before the 2018 federal acreage it is paired with, because that is the vintage the report itself uses.
- Federal acreage covers only the five agencies CRS tabulates (BLM, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, Department of Defense); federal land held by other agencies is excluded from both the acreage and the share.
- Figures cover the 50 states and the District of Columbia only; U.S. territories, land held overseas, and submerged Outer Continental Shelf lands are outside the report's tables and are not included in the United States totals.
- This is the newest version of R42346 that congress.gov serves as a PDF (version 18, updated February 21, 2020); CRS has not issued a newer edition with updated acreage tables as of retrieval.
Pages built on this dataset
Downloads
How to cite
Understand Idaho, “Federal Land Ownership: Overview and Data, Report R42346”, compiled from Congressional Research Service, Federal Land Ownership: Overview and Data, Report R42346. Retrieved September 8, 2026. https://understandidaho.com/data/crs-federal-land/. CC BY 4.0.
Cite Congressional Research Service directly for the figures themselves.
This page was last updated .