Kentucky county map

How Kentucky’s counties are laid out

Kentucky packs 120 counties into 40,408 square miles, so the average county is only about 340 square miles — less than half the size of a typical Alabama or Kansas county. The reason is historical: county lines were drawn when travel was on horseback, and the state constitution long required that a new county seat be reachable within a day from anywhere in the county. The result is a dense patchwork, especially in the hilly east, where counties such as Robertson, Gallatin and Carlisle are under 200 square miles.

The oldest counties date from before statehood, when Kentucky was the western district of Virginia. Kentucky County, Virginia, was split in 1780 into Fayette, Jefferson and Lincoln; the state entered the Union in 1792 with nine counties. New counties were added almost every year through the 19th century, the last being McCreary County in 1912. The state runs across two time zones: the eastern two-thirds, including Louisville, Lexington and Frankfort, are on Eastern Time, while the western counties — roughly everything west of a line running south from the outskirts of Louisville through Bowling Green to the Tennessee line — are on Central Time.

Two of the largest cities have merged with their counties. Louisville and Jefferson County consolidated in 2003 as Louisville Metro, and Lexington and Fayette County have operated as a single urban county government since 1974. Both counties still appear in the table below under their county names.

All 120 counties of Kentucky

Five county facts

• Largest by area: Pike County, seat Pikeville, in the far east on the Virginia and West Virginia lines, at about 790 square miles. It is the heart of the eastern Kentucky coalfield and the setting of the Hatfield–McCoy feud along the Tug Fork.
• Smallest by area: Robertson County, seat Mount Olivet, about 100 square miles, north-east of Lexington. It is also the least populous county in the state, with roughly 2,000 people.
• Most populous: Jefferson County, consolidated with Louisville, with about 780,000 people in 2020 — nearly a fifth of Kentucky’s 4.5 million. Fayette County (Lexington) is second at about 320,000, followed by Kenton County across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.
• Oldest: Fayette, Jefferson and Lincoln counties, all created in 1780 by Virginia. Jefferson was named for Thomas Jefferson, then Virginia’s governor; Fayette for the Marquis de Lafayette.
• Newest: McCreary County, seat Whitley City, formed in 1912 on the Tennessee border from parts of Pulaski, Wayne and Whitley. Kentucky has no independent cities, but Louisville–Jefferson and Lexington–Fayette are consolidated city-county governments.

Reading the map

Press Streets and zoom in to see county lines. The Ohio River forms the entire northern border, and the counties along it from Boyd in the east to Ballard in the west are the state’s river-port counties: Greenup, Mason, Campbell, Kenton, Boone, Jefferson, Daviess (Owensboro), Henderson and McCracken (Paducah). Fulton County at the south-west tip contains the Kentucky Bend, a piece of the state cut off by a loop of the Mississippi River and reachable by land only through Tennessee. The Bluegrass counties around Lexington — Fayette, Woodford, Scott, Bourbon, Jessamine, Clark — are small and wealthy; the mountain counties of the east along the Virginia line — Pike, Letcher, Harlan, Bell — are larger and lie in the Appalachians.

Related maps

• Kentucky map — cities, borders and geography.
• Blank Kentucky map and printable Kentucky map.
• Frankfort, the state capital, in Franklin County; Louisville, the largest city.
• Neighbouring county maps: Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana.
• East South Central states · the South · Eastern and Central time zones.
• Geography: Ohio River, Appalachian Mountains, Mississippi River.
• All US county maps.