A
county seat is a term for an
administrative center for a
county or civil
parish, primarily used in the
United States. In the
Northeast United States, the statutory term often is
shire town, but colloquially
county seat is the term in use there. Parts of the
Canadian Maritimes also use the term
shire town. In
England,
Wales and
Ireland, the term
county town is used. This term is still sometimes used colloquially in
Scotland and
Northern Ireland, but today neither are divided into administrative counties – instead being divided, respectively, into
council areas and
districts.
Louisiana uses
parishes instead of counties, and the administrative center is a "parish seat."
Alaska is organized into "
boroughs," which are large districts, and the administrative center is known as a "
borough seat."
United States counties, as in
England and
Canada, function as administrative subdivisions of a state and have no sovereign jurisdiction of their own, although some have authority to enact and enforce
municipal ordinances. Counties administer state or provincial law at the local level as part of the decentralization of state/provincial authority. In many U.S. states, state government is further decentralized by dividing counties into
townships, to provide local government services to residents of the county who do not live in
incorporated cities or
towns.
A county seat is usually, but not always, an incorporated municipality. The exceptions include, but are not limited to, the county seats of counties that have no incorporated municipalities within their borders, such as
Arlington County, Virginia and
Howard County, Maryland. (
Ellicott City, the county seat of Howard County, is the largest unincorporated county seat in the United States, followed by
Towson, the county seat of Baltimore County.) The county courthouse and county administration are usually located in the county seat, but some functions may also be conducted in other parts of the county, especially if it is geographically large.
Most counties have only one county seat. However, some counties in
Alabama,
Arkansas,
Iowa,
Kentucky,
Massachusetts,
Mississippi,
Missouri,
New Hampshire,
New York, and
Vermont have two or more county seats, usually located on opposite sides of the county. An example is
Harrison County, Mississippi, which lists both
Biloxi and
Gulfport as county seats. The practice of multiple county seat towns dates from the days when travel was difficult. There have been few efforts to eliminate the two-seat arrangement, since a county seat is a source of pride (and jobs) for the towns involved.
Connecticut and
Rhode Island have no county level of government and thus no county seats.
Vermont has shire towns but little county government, consisting only of a Superior Court and Sheriff (as an
officer of the court). Massachusetts has abolished a number of its counties and the state now operates the registries of deeds and sheriff's offices in those districts. Two counties in
South Dakota,
Shannon County, and
Todd County, have their county seat and government services centered in a neighboring county. Their county-level services are provided by
Fall River County and
Tripp County, respectively.
Though
New York City is a single city, it stretches across five counties. Often referred to as the boroughs of New York, each is also a separate geographic (unorganized) county, with city-sponsored borough officials. The five counties that compose New York City are Bronx County (
The Bronx), Kings County (
Brooklyn), New York County (
Manhattan), Queens County (
Queens), and Richmond County (
Staten Island). The "county seats" of Richmond and Queens County are effectively neighborhoods, though they correspond roughly to the location of borough hall.
Kansas City,
Missouri, is situated in four counties, Jackson, Clay, Cass and Platte. It is the county seat of Jackson County, along with nearby
Independence.
In
Virginia, there are (since 2001) 39
independent cities, which are legally distinct from the counties that surround them. An independent city interacts with the commonwealth (state) government directly whereas towns, the only other type of municipal government authority in Virginia, do so through the county government apparatus. In many of Virginia's counties, the county government offices are located within the independent cities of their neighboring counties. Also, for certain statistical purposes, some independent cities are considered part of the county from which they separated. For example, the
City of Fairfax is separate from
Fairfax County, the county's offices lie within the city, and the city is combined with Fairfax County statistically.
Similarly, the
city of Baltimore,
Maryland is also an independent city, and much like Fairfax, surrounded on three sides by a county of the same name. However, unlike Fairfax, "Baltimore City", as it is officially known, is not politically or statistically connected with surrounding Baltimore County. Besides Baltimore City and the independent cities of Virginia, there are only two other independent cities in the United States:
St. Louis,
Missouri; and
Carson City,
Nevada. Several other cities, among them
San Francisco,
California;
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania;
Denver,
Colorado; and
New Orleans,
Louisiana, are all
a city and a county (or in the case of Louisiana, a parish), with a consolidated government. In all of the named cities except for New Orleans, the city and county names are identical; in New Orleans, the city is coextensive with Orleans Parish.
Similar to Virginia, the Canadian province of Ontario has 17
separated municipalities which are municipalities that interact directly with the province without an intermediary county. Although administratively and legally separate from the county, many of these cities still serve as the seat of the county that surrounds them. Ontario also has several
single-tier municipalities, many of which serve as a single county government with no lower municipal governments below it. In these cases, the county effectively
is the local government in these areas, with a
community in the county assigned as the seat, even though it has no municipal government of its own.
U.S. Counties with more than one county seat
There are 34 counties with multiple county seats (no more than two each) in 11 states:
Lists of U.S. county seats by state
