City, Town, CDP: What the Census Actually Counts as a Place

We publish demographic profiles for 31,555 places across the United States. If you assume every one of them is a city or a town with a mayor and a budget, you’ll misread a big share of the map. More than 12,000 of those places — over a third — are something else entirely: census-designated places, or CDPs. They have names, borders, and populations, but no government. Understanding the difference is the key to reading local data correctly.

What the Census means by “place”

To the Census Bureau, a place is a concentration of population with a name and a boundary. That’s it. The category deliberately covers two very different kinds of thing.

The first kind is an incorporated place — a settlement with a legal existence granted by its state: a city, town, village, or borough with its own government and, usually, its own taxes and services. Chicago is an incorporated place. So is a village of four hundred people in rural Nebraska. Legal status, not size, is what makes it incorporated.

The second kind is a census-designated place (CDP). A CDP is the Bureau’s answer to a real problem: enormous numbers of Americans live in recognizable, named communities that were never legally incorporated. Silicon Valley’s densest tech hubs, unincorporated suburbs, coastal settlements, and reservation communities all have names everyone uses and no city hall to match. To count these residents in a way that matches how they’d describe where they live, the Bureau draws a boundary and gives the community a statistical identity — a CDP. It has demographics but no government, no mayor, and no power to tax.

In our data the breakdown looks like this:

Type	Count	What it is
City	10,192	Incorporated, with a government
CDP / other community	12,120	Named settlement, no government
Town	4,325	Incorporated (meaning varies by state)
Village	3,714	Incorporated, usually smaller
Borough	1,204	Incorporated (chiefly PA, NJ, AK)

The single largest category isn’t “city.” It’s the CDP.

Why “town” doesn’t mean the same thing twice

Even among incorporated places, the labels don’t travel. What a “town” is depends entirely on which state you’re standing in.

In New England, towns are powerful units of local government — in much of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont, the town, not the county, is where local decisions actually get made, and town meetings still set budgets. In New York and Wisconsin, a “town” (or “township”) is a subdivision that can contain incorporated villages inside it. In much of the South and West, “town” is just a smaller flavor of city. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Alaska lean on “borough” for something similar; elsewhere a borough is a division of New York City.

This is why we read the entity type straight from each place’s official Census name rather than guessing from population. A “village” of 40,000 and a “city” of 900 both exist, and the label is a legal fact about the place, not a description of its size. On this site the displayed name is cleaned up for readability — “Boston city” becomes Boston — but the underlying type is preserved so the data stays honest.

Why the label changes how you read the numbers

This isn’t pedantry. The incorporated-versus-CDP distinction quietly shapes the statistics.

An incorporated city’s boundary is a legal line, sometimes drawn generations ago and frozen while the region grew around it. A CDP’s boundary is drawn by statisticians to match the settlement on the ground today. So a CDP often captures a tidy, homogeneous community, while a legal city might bundle a wealthy downtown with annexed industrial land and a struggling neighborhood the city absorbed in 1970. Two places with the same population can be measuring very different footprints.

Boundaries also shift. After each decennial census the Bureau revises CDPs and adds new ones; hundreds of communities that had no separate data a decade ago now appear as CDPs for the first time. When a place seems to “appear” in the data, it usually means its community finally got a boundary of its own — not that anyone moved in.

Finally, the label tells you what kind of question the place can answer. Ask “who governs here, and what’s the tax base?” and only an incorporated place has an answer. Ask “who lives here?” and a CDP answers just as well as a city. Matching the question to the type keeps you from, say, comparing a CDP’s demographics to a city’s budget as if they were the same kind of object.

The county underneath

Every place, incorporated or not, also sits inside a county (or a county-equivalent — Louisiana has parishes, Alaska has boroughs and census areas, and a handful of cities are independent of any county). The county is the layer that usually holds courts, jails, property records, and health departments. Because a single place can straddle more than one county, we map each place to its primary county so the local picture stays connected — a piece of plumbing that took a fair amount of spatial work to get right for all 31,555 places.

So the next time you pull up a place profile, glance at the type. A city, a town, a village, a borough, and a CDP are five different kinds of thing wearing similar names. The demographics are equally real for all of them — but what the place is, and what its boundary means, changes what those numbers are telling you. You can browse them all through the state and city rankings, and the exact definitions live in our glossary.