The Geographic Change Notes provide an online resource for selected geographic changes to incorporated places, census designated places, county subdivisions, counties and equivalent areas, and American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian areas as recognized by the U.S. Census Bureau, within the 50 States, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Island Areas (American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands).
For a list of changes processed through December 31, 2023, select the “Download Geographic Change Notes” section from the list below.
On this page:
Types of changes found on this website include:
Change records are sorted by state with each entity having a unique code combination. In addition to the state and entity codes, the record for each entity contains several related items of information for that entity and the change affecting it.
Each county is assigned a 3-digit code that is unique within each state. These codes are assigned alphabetically starting with 001. For example, Autauga County, Alabama, is assigned a code of 001 in the Alabama file; Montgomery County, Maryland, is assigned a code of 031 in the Maryland file.
The independent cities of Baltimore, Maryland; St. Louis, Missouri; Carson City, Nevada; and the 38 independent cities in Virginia are independent of any county and, thus, constitute primary divisions of their states. As such, independent cities are treated as county equivalents. County codes for independent cities are assigned alphabetically within the state beginning at 500. Data shown for the independent city at the place and county subdivision level are identical to the data for its county equivalent.
Each county subdivision is assigned a 5-digit Federal Information Processing Series (FIPS) code assigned alphabetically. For example, Alamo, in Montgomery County, Arkansas is assigned code 90013.
Legal, functioning county subdivisions FIPS codes are assigned alphabetically beginning with 00001. Legal, non-functioning county subdivisions and census county divisions are assigned FIPS codes alphabetically beginning with 90000.
Each place is assigned a 5-digit Federal Information Processing Series (FIPS) code assigned alphabetically. For example, Munford city, Tennessee is assigned code 51540.
In some states, places can be independent (an independent place) of any surrounding county subdivision and each county-part is treated as a separate county subdivision. This is true for all incorporated places in the District of Columbia, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Wisconsin and some incorporated places in 14 additional states. In these cases, the name and codes for the county subdivision match that for the incorporated place. For example, Chicago city, Illinois, is independent of any surrounding township and is shown as two county subdivisions named Chicago city with the same codes in Cook and DuPage counties.
Note: Examples of places include Incorporated Place, Consolidated City, and Census Designated Place (Entity Type = P).
Information provided for each Change Note includes: the state FIPS code; the entity name; the name and code of each county in which the entity is located (applies only to place and county subdivisions); the entity FIPS code; the type of change that occurred, the legal effective date of change; the legal effective year of change; the legal effective month of change; the legal effective day of change; a detailed description of the change; the source from which the information was obtained, the date the change was submitted to the Census Bureau's geographic change note database and the entity's 8-digit National Standard (ANSI) code.
For a complete description see the Geographic Boundary Change Notes Record Layout page.
Note: The ANSI code is not included in all records. It is not provided for any records between 2000 and 2013.
Note: Neither the effective date nor the submittal date can be used to always determine when a change was applied to the geographic database or to determine the yearly product first showing the change.
These ASCII pipe-delimited files are first sequenced in numerical order based on the FIPS state codes; that is, the states and the District of Columbia occur first in numeric sequence, followed by Puerto Rico and the Outlying Areas. Within state, the files are sequenced alphabetically by entity name.
For a list of changes processed before January 1, 2024, select a decade / year from the tabs below. A list of state and territories is available within each tab.
Choose a State to View.