Texas county map

How Texas’s counties are laid out

With 254 counties across 268,596 square miles, Texas averages just over 1,000 square miles per county, but the range is enormous: Brewster County alone is bigger than Connecticut, while Rockwall County east of Dallas would fit inside it nearly fifty times. The first 23 counties were created by the Republic of Texas in 1836 from the Mexican municipalities — Bexar, Nacogdoches, San Augustine, Goliad, Victoria, Washington and Harrisburg (later Harris) among them. As settlement moved west and north, the legislature drew new counties in tiers of neat squares, about 30 miles on a side, so that no resident would be more than a day’s ride from the courthouse. That rule is why the Panhandle and the South Plains form an almost perfect grid of 26 identical squares, laid out in 1876 in a single act.

County names honour the men of the Revolution and the Republic (Austin, Houston, Travis, Bowie, Crockett, Fannin, Milam, Lamar, Burnet, Rusk, Zavala, Navarro), Confederate and Mexican War figures, and early settlers; a few keep Spanish and Native names (Bexar, Nueces, Comal, Angelina, Comanche, Cherokee, Wichita). The names on the map are sometimes deceptive: Houston is in Harris County, while Houston County’s seat is Crockett; Austin is in Travis County, and Austin County’s seat is Bellville.

Every county is governed by a commissioners court of four commissioners and a county judge, a structure fixed by the 1876 constitution. There are no independent cities and no consolidated city-counties; Texas cities routinely spill across county lines, and Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth each lie in three or more counties.

All 254 counties of Texas

Five county facts

• Largest by area: Brewster County, seat Alpine, about 6,190 square miles of the Big Bend country between the Davis Mountains and the Rio Grande, most of it desert, with Big Bend National Park in its southern half. Pecos, Hudspeth, Presidio and Culberson counties in the same Trans-Pecos region are the next largest.
• Smallest by area: Rockwall County, seat Rockwall, about 130 square miles on the east shore of Lake Ray Hubbard in the Dallas suburbs — and one of the fastest-growing counties in the state.
• Most populous: Harris County, seat Houston, with about 4.73 million people in 2020, the third most populous county in the United States. Dallas (2.6 million), Tarrant (Fort Worth, 2.1 million), Bexar (San Antonio, 2.0 million) and Travis (Austin, 1.3 million) complete the top five.
• Least populous: Loving County, seat Mentone, on the New Mexico line in the Permian Basin, with 64 residents in the 2020 Census — the least populous county in the country. King, Kenedy and Borden counties each had fewer than 700.
• Oldest and newest: the 23 counties of 1836 are the oldest; Bexar (San Antonio) traces its name to the Spanish presidio of 1718. Kenedy County (1921), carved from Willacy, Hidalgo and Cameron on the King Ranch coast, is the newest; Loving County, created in 1887 but not organised until 1931, was the last to open a government. Texas has no independent cities.

Reading the map

Press Streets and zoom in on the highlighted state to see county lines. The Panhandle grid and the tidy squares of the Rolling Plains and the South Plains give way to more irregular river-bounded counties in East Texas, where the map is oldest, and to giant desert counties beyond the Pecos. The Rio Grande forms the entire border with Mexico along 15 counties from El Paso to Cameron. Only two counties, El Paso and Hudspeth in the far west, keep Mountain Time; the other 252, including every major city, keep Central Time. Austin, the capital, is the seat of Travis County on the Colorado River (the Texas one, not the western river of the same name).

Related maps

• Texas map — cities, borders and geography.
• Blank Texas map and printable Texas map.
• Austin, the state capital, in Travis County; Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth and El Paso.
• Neighbouring county maps: New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana.
• West South Central states · the Southwest · Gulf Coast · Central Time Zone.
• Geography: Rio Grande, Gulf of Mexico, Great Plains.
• All US county maps.