How to download Census Land Area Data by County

Question

I am looking to download land area (e.g. square meters) data for U.S. counties from the U.S. Census Bureau. I can't seem to find this data on the census website. Has anyone been able to find this data in the past?

On the TIGERweb site, I found the data that I am looking for, but it is broken down by state. Ideally, I'd be able to download the data for all counties in a single file.
https://tigerweb.geo.census.gov/tigerwebmain/TIGERweb2020_counties_census2010.html

Thanks for the help!

I have tried various searches on the U.S. Census website but have not had any luck finding land area data.

Answer 1

You can get this data from the U.S. Census Bureau: Gazetteer Files > Counties: https://www.census.gov/geographies/reference-files/time-series/geo/gazetteer-files.html

Click "Download the National Counties Gazetteer File" to download the zip file, and uncompress it to get a (tab-delineated) table containing information about all counties (or county-equivalent areas) for all 50 states, District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. See columns ALAND_SQMI and AWATER_SQMI for the land and water area respectively (in square miles).

Or, if you're on linux (or macOS), download the specific file (at least as of today, 2023-07-31) in a few lines:

wget "https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/maps-data/data/gazetteer/2022_Gazetteer/2022_Gaz_counties_national.zip" -O tmp.zip
unzip -p tmp.zip > 2022_Gaz_counties_national.txt
rm -f tmp.zip

Then if you want to just have simple data frame with the area of each county, in R (since you tagged this with R):

df_gaz_counties <- read.delim("2022_Gaz_counties_national.txt")
df_select <- df_gaz_counties[c("USPS","NAME","ALAND_SQMI","AWATER_SQMI")]

Now df_select has the info you want. Here's the first 6 rows (printed with head(df_select)) to demonstrate:

  USPS           NAME ALAND_SQMI AWATER_SQMI
1   AL Autauga County    594.455       9.914
2   AL Baldwin County   1589.863     437.410
3   AL Barbour County    885.008      19.507
4   AL    Bibb County    622.470       3.696
5   AL  Blount County    644.891       5.738
6   AL Bullock County    622.815       2.328

Answer 2

Use the tigris package. The counties() function returns a column, ALAND, that gives you land area in square meters.

library(tigris)

us_counties <- counties(cb = TRUE)

us_counties %>%
  dplyr::select(county = NAMELSAD,
                state = STATE_NAME,
                land_area = ALAND,
                water_area = AWATER)

Simple feature collection with 3234 features and 4 fields
Geometry type: MULTIPOLYGON
Dimension:     XY
Bounding box:  xmin: -179.1489 ymin: -14.5487 xmax: 179.7785 ymax: 71.36516
Geodetic CRS:  NAD83
First 10 features:
                county        state  land_area water_area
1         Riley County       Kansas 1579077672   32047392
2      Ringgold County         Iowa 1386932347    8723135
3        Carbon County      Montana 5303728455   35213028
4     Bear Lake County        Idaho 2527123155  191364281
5       Buffalo County    Wisconsin 1750290818   87549529
6          York County     Nebraska 1482794063    8595055
7         Eagle County     Colorado 4362754228   18970639
8  Westmoreland County Pennsylvania 2661762744   21294228
9      Le Flore County     Oklahoma 4116554962   49752941
10       Burnet County        Texas 2576525880   69856136
                         geometry
1  MULTIPOLYGON (((-96.96095 3...
2  MULTIPOLYGON (((-94.47167 4...
3  MULTIPOLYGON (((-109.7987 4...
4  MULTIPOLYGON (((-111.6345 4...
5  MULTIPOLYGON (((-92.08384 4...
6  MULTIPOLYGON (((-97.82629 4...
7  MULTIPOLYGON (((-107.1137 3...
8  MULTIPOLYGON (((-79.90487 4...
9  MULTIPOLYGON (((-95.05996 3...
10 MULTIPOLYGON (((-98.45924 3...