Utah county map

How Utah’s counties are laid out

Utah’s 29 counties cover 84,897 square miles, an average of nearly 2,930 square miles each, and they are shaped by settlement rather than surveying. The first counties were created in 1850 by the provisional State of Deseret and confirmed by the new Utah Territory: Salt Lake, Weber, Davis, Utah, Tooele, Sanpete and Iron, each centred on a Mormon settlement along the Wasatch Front or the road south to the iron mission at Parowan. Later counties followed the same pattern, and most seats are still the towns the pioneers founded in the 1850s and 1860s.

The territorial counties were once much bigger. Several stretched from the Sierra Nevada to the Rockies before Nevada and Colorado were split off in 1861, and eastern Utah stayed largely unorganised until the Uinta Basin and the canyon country were opened after 1880. The names are a mix of Latter-day Saint leaders and pioneers (Morgan, Rich, Kane), local Native peoples and words (Utah, Uintah, Piute, Sanpete, Tooele, Juab, Wasatch), and landscape (Box Elder, Cache, Beaver, Garfield and Grand for the Grand River, now the Colorado).

Utah counties are governed by elected commissions or, in a few cases, councils; Salt Lake County has an elected mayor. There are no independent cities and no consolidated city-counties. Salt Lake City is the seat of Salt Lake County, and the four counties of the Wasatch Front — Salt Lake, Utah, Davis and Weber — contain about three-quarters of the state’s population in a strip roughly 80 miles long.

All 29 counties of Utah

Five county facts

• Largest by area: San Juan County, seat Monticello, about 7,820 square miles in the south-east corner, including Monument Valley, the Utah part of the Navajo Nation, Bears Ears and the Four Corners. Tooele, Millard, Kane and Garfield counties are also above 5,000 square miles.
• Smallest by area: Davis County, seat Farmington, about 300 square miles of land squeezed between the Wasatch Range and the Great Salt Lake north of Salt Lake City. Morgan County is the second smallest.
• Most populous: Salt Lake County, with about 1.19 million people in 2020 out of Utah’s 3,271,616. Utah County (Provo) is second at about 660,000 and has been the fastest-growing large county in the state.
• Least populous: Daggett County, seat Manila, in the north-east corner above Flaming Gorge Reservoir, with fewer than 1,000 people. Piute, Rich and Wayne counties are also below 3,000.
• Oldest and newest: the seven counties of 1850 — Salt Lake, Weber, Davis, Utah, Tooele, Sanpete and Iron — are the oldest. Daggett County, split from Uintah in 1918, is the newest. Utah has no independent cities.

Reading the map

Press Streets and zoom in on the highlighted state to see county lines. The small, crowded counties of the Wasatch Front stand out along the north-centre of the state; the huge counties of the west desert (Tooele, Juab, Millard, Beaver, Iron) and the canyonlands of the south-east (San Juan, Grand, Emery, Wayne, Garfield, Kane) make up most of the area. Utah’s five national parks all lie in the southern counties, and the Colorado Plateau covers everything south and east of the Wasatch. The state’s rectangular outline is broken only by the notch in the north-east where Wyoming cuts into Summit, Daggett and Rich counties. The whole state keeps Mountain Time, unlike neighbouring Arizona, which does not observe daylight saving.

Related maps

• Utah map — cities, borders and geography.
• Blank Utah map and printable Utah map.
• Salt Lake City, the state capital and seat of Salt Lake County.
• Neighbouring county maps: Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico.
• Mountain states · the West · Mountain Time Zone.
• Geography: Four Corners, Colorado Plateau, Colorado River, National parks.
• All US county maps.