Michigan county map

How Michigan’s counties are laid out

Michigan’s 83 counties fall into two very different groups. The Lower Peninsula, the “mitten”, has 68 counties laid out on the rectangular survey grid, most of them roughly 24 miles square with four townships to a side. The Upper Peninsula has only 15 counties, but they are far larger and emptier: the whole U.P. holds about 300,000 people, fewer than the city of Detroit alone.

Many of the oldest county names were chosen in 1829 by the territorial governor Lewis Cass and honour members of Andrew Jackson’s cabinet — Barry, Berrien, Branch, Calhoun, Cass, Eaton, Ingham and Van Buren. A second group of 1840 names (Alcona, Alpena, Arenac, Iosco, Kalkaska, Leelanau, Oscoda, Tuscola) were invented by the ethnographer Henry Schoolcraft from Native American word fragments and have no meaning in any language. Older French and Ojibwe names survive around the lakes: Cheboygan, Keweenaw, Mackinac, Muskegon, Presque Isle, Sault Ste. Marie.

The county seat of Mackinac County, St. Ignace, and of Chippewa County, Sault Ste. Marie, are among the oldest European settlements in the Midwest. Detroit is both the seat of Wayne County and the largest city in the state; the capital, Lansing, is the seat of Ingham County but spills into Eaton and Clinton counties. Michigan has no independent cities and no consolidated city-counties.

All 83 counties of Michigan

Five county facts

• Largest by area: Marquette County on the Lake Superior shore of the Upper Peninsula, about 1,800 square miles of land — the largest county in the state by land and larger than Rhode Island. Its seat, Marquette, is the biggest city in the U.P. Counting water, Keweenaw and Chippewa counties, which include huge tracts of Lake Superior and Lake Huron, are larger still.
• Smallest by area: Benzie County, on Lake Michigan south of Traverse City, with about 320 square miles of land; its seat, Beulah, has only a few hundred residents.
• Most populous: Wayne County, seat Detroit, with about 1.79 million people in 2020 — still the largest county in the state even after decades of decline. Oakland County (Pontiac) and Macomb County (Mount Clemens) complete the three-county Detroit core; Kent County (Grand Rapids) is fourth.
• Least populous: Keweenaw County at the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula, seat Eagle River, with about 2,000 people. Its copper mines closed by the 1960s and the county now lives on tourism and Isle Royale National Park, which lies within its boundaries.
• Oldest and newest: Wayne County was proclaimed in 1796 and is the oldest; Monroe (1817) and Macomb (1818) followed. The last county to be organised was Dickinson County in the western U.P., created in 1891 from parts of Iron, Marquette and Menominee counties. Michigan has no independent cities.

Reading the map

Press Streets and zoom in to see the county grid. On the Lower Peninsula the lines are almost all straight; the exceptions are the shoreline counties, whose outer edges follow Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Saginaw Bay and the St. Clair and Detroit rivers. The Thumb — Huron, Tuscola and Sanilac counties — is the flat farming district east of Saginaw Bay. Grand Traverse, Leelanau, Antrim, Charlevoix and Emmet form the resort coast around Grand Traverse Bay. The Upper Peninsula counties are sliced by rivers and the Menominee, Iron and Gogebic boundaries follow the Wisconsin line.

Michigan is a split time-zone state. The four western Upper Peninsula counties that border Wisconsin — Gogebic, Iron, Dickinson and Menominee — keep Central Time to stay in step with Wisconsin’s cities; the other 79 counties, including all of the Lower Peninsula, are on Eastern Time. The zone line runs along the county boundaries, so Iron Mountain is on Central while Marquette, 60 miles north-east, is on Eastern.

Related maps

• Michigan map — cities, borders and the Great Lakes.
• Blank Michigan map and printable Michigan map.
• Lansing, the state capital, in Ingham County.
• Neighbouring county maps: Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin.
• East North Central states · the Midwest · Great Lakes region.
• Eastern Time Zone and Central Time Zone.
• Geography: Great Lakes, US lakes, national parks (Isle Royale).
• All US county maps.