Wisconsin county map

How Wisconsin’s counties are laid out

Wisconsin’s 72 counties cover 65,496 square miles, an average of about 910 square miles each. The first two, Brown and Crawford, were created by Michigan Territory in 1818, when Wisconsin was its western wilderness: Brown covered the Green Bay settlement and Crawford the fur post at Prairie du Chien. Iowa County followed in 1829 for the lead-mining district of the south-west. The counties of the south and east were laid out in the 1836–1850 land rush, mostly as regular blocks of surveyed townships, and the northern forest counties were subdivided in the decades after the Civil War as lumbering moved up the Wisconsin, Chippewa and Wolf rivers. Iron, Forest, Oneida, Price, Sawyer and Vilas all date from 1879–1893.

The names are a mixture of Native words for rivers and lakes (Kewaunee, Manitowoc, Milwaukee, Outagamie, Ozaukee, Sheboygan, Waukesha, Waupaca, Waushara, Winnebago, Chippewa, Menominee), presidents and statesmen (Adams, Jackson, Jefferson, Monroe, Polk, Taylor, Washington, Lincoln, Grant, Clark, Dodge, Dane), and settlers or landscape (Door for the strait of Death’s Door, Green Lake, Marathon, Wood, Iron, Forest). Fond du Lac, La Crosse, Eau Claire, Portage and Racine are French, from the voyageur era.

Every county elects a board of supervisors; a number of the larger ones, including Milwaukee and Dane, also elect a county executive. There are no independent cities and no consolidated city-counties. Menominee County, created in 1961 when the Menominee tribe’s federal status was terminated, is unusual: it is coterminous with the Menominee Indian Reservation (restored in 1973) and with the single town of Menominee, and its seat, Keshena, is an unincorporated community. Madison, the capital, is the seat of Dane County.

All 72 counties of Wisconsin

Five county facts

• Largest by area: Marathon County, seat Wausau, about 1,545 square miles on the upper Wisconsin River in the geographic centre of the state. Bayfield, Douglas and Oneida counties in the north are next, each above 1,100 square miles of land.
• Smallest by area: Pepin County, seat Durand, about 230 square miles on the Mississippi at Lake Pepin — only marginally smaller than Ozaukee County north of Milwaukee.
• Most populous: Milwaukee County, with about 940,000 people in 2020. Dane County (Madison) is second at about 560,000 and has been growing far faster; Waukesha and Brown counties follow.
• Least populous: Menominee County, with about 4,300 people, nearly all of them members of the Menominee Nation. Florence and Iron counties in the north are next, each around 4,500–6,000.
• Oldest and newest: Brown County (Green Bay) and Crawford County (Prairie du Chien), both organised in 1818 under Michigan Territory, are the oldest. Menominee County (1961) is the newest — it was the last county created anywhere in the United States for more than two decades. Wisconsin has no independent cities.

Reading the map

Press Streets and zoom in on the highlighted state to see county lines. The southern two-thirds of the map is a grid of roughly square counties following the township survey, with a few river-bounded exceptions along the Mississippi (Grant, Crawford, Vernon, La Crosse, Trempealeau, Buffalo, Pepin, Pierce) and along the Wisconsin. The northern counties are larger, irregular and heavily forested. Door County juts into Lake Michigan as a long peninsula; Bayfield County reaches north to the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior; and the Menominee River and the straight survey line beyond it mark the border with Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Milwaukee County, with about 240 square miles, is one of the smallest yet holds a sixth of the state’s people. The whole state keeps Central Time.

Related maps

• Wisconsin map — cities, borders and geography.
• Blank Wisconsin map and printable Wisconsin map.
• Madison, the state capital, in Dane County; Milwaukee.
• Neighbouring county maps: Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois.
• East North Central states · Great Lakes region · the Midwest · Central Time Zone.
• Geography: Great Lakes, Mississippi River, Major US lakes.
• All US county maps.