Why does Alaska have boroughs?

Alaska has no counties because its constitution never created any. The document was written in the years before statehood and took effect when Alaska became a state in 1959. The delegates who drafted it looked at the county model used across the rest of the country and chose not to copy it. In its place they wrote boroughs: regional units that a populated area could form for itself once it had the people and the tax base to pay for the services a regional government provides. Much of Alaska never reached that point. Everything that has not organized sits inside a single Unorganized Borough covering an enormous stretch of the state. Because the Census Bureau still has to publish numbers for that territory, it carves the Unorganized Borough into 11 census areas. Those 11 have no government and no county seat. They exist so that statistics have somewhere to live.

Add it up and Alaska has 30 county-equivalents, which is what the state’s full county list shows: 13 boroughs, 4 cities and boroughs, 2 municipalities and 11 census areas. Only 19 of the 30 are governments.

A constitution written to avoid weak counties

The local government article of the Alaska constitution is short and unusually permissive. It is built around two units, the borough and the city, and it leaves the legislature to set the standards for how a borough forms and what class it belongs to. The usual account of the convention is that the delegates wanted to keep the map simple, avoiding both a thicket of overlapping special districts and thinly funded county governments propped up by the state. That reading of their intent is interpretive, but the structure they produced is not. A new state with a small population spread over an enormous area got a system in which government follows settlement instead of blanketing the map in advance.

That is the practical difference between Alaska and everywhere else. In the other 49 states, county-equivalent boundaries cover the whole surface by default and a government comes with the line. In Alaska, the line generally exists only where somebody organized one.

The four organized forms

Alaska’s 19 organized county-equivalents carry four different type words, and the Census Bureau records whichever one the entity’s own legal name uses.

Borough is the ordinary form, and there are 13 of them. A borough is a regional government with an assembly and a mayor, carrying whichever functions its class of borough has taken on, education and land use planning among them.

City and borough applies to 4 entities: Juneau, Sitka, Wrangell and Yakutat. These are unified governments, where one body does the work of both a city and the surrounding borough, so no separate city government operates inside the borough boundary.

Municipality applies to 2, Anchorage and Skagway. Anchorage is a unified municipality, formed when the city of Anchorage merged with the surrounding Greater Anchorage Area Borough into a single government, and it is the state’s main population center. Skagway uses the same word for a much smaller unified municipality in the southeast panhandle.

The line between “city and borough” and “municipality” looks more like naming convention than legal substance, since both describe a unified city plus borough government. What matters for anyone joining data is that the Census Bureau publishes the legal name as written, so a lookup keyed on the word “Borough” will silently miss Anchorage, Skagway, Juneau, Sitka, Wrangell and Yakutat.

The Unorganized Borough and its 11 census areas

Everything outside those 19 governments is the Unorganized Borough. There is no borough assembly and no borough tax. The state legislature acts in place of a borough government where one would otherwise be needed, and public schooling across much of the area is generally run through regional attendance areas rather than locally taxing school districts.

The 11 census areas are the Census Bureau’s own subdivision of that territory: Aleutians West, Bethel, Chugach, Copper River, Dillingham, Hoonah-Angoon, Kusilvak, Nome, Prince of Wales-Hyder, Southeast Fairbanks and Yukon-Koyukuk. They exist so that population and housing data can be tabulated at something smaller than the whole Unorganized Borough, and they are statistical geography and nothing more. If you go looking for the county seat of the Bethel Census Area there is not one, and the same holds for the other ten.

The distinction is not unique to Alaska, but Alaska supplies the largest single block of it. Of the 35 county-equivalents nationally that have no county government, 11 are these census areas, 9 are Connecticut’s planning regions, 5 are Rhode Island’s counties, 9 are in Massachusetts and one is Kalawao County in Hawaii. Twenty-one entities have no county seat at all. The full picture of counties without county government sets out how each case came about.

The same thinness shapes what data exists. The American Community Survey publishes 1-year estimates only for areas of 65,000 people or more, which covers 845 of the 3,144 county-equivalents in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The other 2,299 appear only in the 5-year estimates, which pool several years of sample to reach a usable size. Lightly populated county-equivalents, in Alaska and elsewhere, sit on that side of the line, so a figure pulled for a census area is usually a five-year average rather than a single-year reading.

Boundaries that keep moving

Alaska’s county-equivalent map has changed twice in the past decade, which matters if you are joining data across years.

Valdez-Cordova Census Area, GEOID 02261, was dissolved effective 2 January 2019 and replaced by two new census areas, Chugach 02063 and Copper River 02066. Any time series crossing that date has a hole in it unless you aggregate the two successors back together.

Wade Hampton Census Area, GEOID 02270, was replaced by Kusilvak Census Area, GEOID 02158, on 1 July 2015. The change was to the name rather than the territory, but the code changed anyway, because FIPS county codes are assigned alphabetically within a state, so a rename usually forces a renumbering. The same thing happened when Shannon County, South Dakota, 46113, became Oglala Lakota County, 46102, in May 2015. If you need an identifier that survives a rename, use COUNTYNS, the 8-digit GNIS code that sits alongside the rest of the numbering described in understanding FIPS codes.

Petersburg is the counterexample. It was Petersburg Census Area and became Petersburg Borough, moving from statistical geography to real government, and it kept GEOID 02195 throughout. That is why Petersburg counts among the 13 boroughs rather than the 11 census areas, and why a code-based join across that change works while a type-based one does not.

The scale problem

The six largest county-equivalents in the United States by land area are all in Alaska, and three of the six have no government.

County-equivalent	Land area (sq mi)	Has a government
Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area	145,767.49	No
North Slope Borough	88,792.78	Yes
Bethel Census Area	40,654.88	No
Northwest Arctic Borough	35,671.70	Yes
Southeast Fairbanks Census Area	24,839.23	No
Matanuska-Susitna Borough	24,707.12	Yes

The largest county-equivalent outside Alaska is San Bernardino County, California, at 20,068.42 square miles, which is smaller than any of those six. The ranking of largest and smallest counties puts those figures next to the other extreme, where Falls Church city, Virginia, covers 2.05 square miles.

Any per capita or per square mile statistic computed on an Alaska census area should be read with that in mind. These are not units somebody drew in order to govern them. They are containers the Census Bureau built so that a very large, very thinly settled part of the country would have a row in the table.