The Federal Information Processing Standard Publication 6-4 (FIPS 6-4) is a five-digit

Federal Information Processing Standards The Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) of the United States are a set of publicly announced standards that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed for use in computer systems of non-military, American ...

code which uniquely identified

counties A county is a geographic region of a country used for administrative or other purposesChambers Dictionary, L. Brookes (ed.), 2005, Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd, Edinburgh in certain modern nations. The term is derived from the Old French ...

and county equivalents in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

, certain U.S. possessions, and certain freely associated states. On September 2, 2008, the

US Department of Commerce The United States Department of Commerce is an executive department of the U.S. federal government concerned with creating the conditions for economic growth and opportunity. Among its tasks are gathering economic and demographic data for busin ...

, following three years of review and comments from "public, research communities, manufacturers, voluntary standards organizations, and Federal, State, and local government organizations", announced that FIPS 6-4 was one of ten FIPS standards withdrawn by the department's

National Institute of Standards and Technology The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical sci ...

(NIST). Deemed "obsolete, or have not been updated to adopt current voluntary industry standards, federal specifications, federal data standards, or current good practices for information security", the NIST replaced FIPS 6-4 with "

INCITS The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), (pronounced "insights"), is an ANSI-accredited standards development organization composed of Information technology developers. It was formerly known as the X3 and NCITS. ...

31 – 2009" codes for the "Identification of the States and Equivalent Areas within the United States, Puerto Rico, and the Insular Areas". The five-digit codes of FIPS 6-4 used the two digit

FIPS state code FIPS state codes were numeric and two-letter alphabetic codes defined in U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard Publication ("FIPS PUB") 5-2 to identify U.S. states and certain other associated areas. The standard superseded FIPS PUB 5-1 o ...

(FIPS Publication 5-2, also withdrawn on September 2, 2008), followed by the three digits of the county code within the state or possession. County FIPS codes in the United States are usually (with a few exceptions) in the same sequence as alphabetized county names within a state. They are usually (but not always) odd numbers, so that new or changed county names can be fit in their alphabetical sequence slot. In response to the NIST decision, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that it would replace the FIPS 6-4 codes with the INCITS 31 codes after the 2010 Census, with the Census bureau assigning new codes as needed for their internal use during the transition. The Census Bureau decided that, based on decades of using the terminology FIPS to describe its codes, it would continue to use the FIPS name for its updated codes, where FIPS now stood for FIP "Series", since there no longer existed an official FIP "Standard". FIPS county codes are still used by the

Emergency Alert System The Emergency Alert System (EAS) is a national warning system in the United States designed to allow authorized officials to broadcast emergency alerts and warning messages to the public via cable, satellite, or broadcast television, and both ...

(EAS) and

NOAA Weather Radio NOAA Weather Radio NWR; also known as NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards is an automated 24-hour network of VHF FM weather radio stations in the United States (U.S.) that broadcast weather information directly from a nearby National Weather Serv ...

(NWR) to define geographic locations for their SAME-based public alerting systems. In this application, a "0" (zero) is added as the first digit and used as a "placeholder", making each FIPS code a six-digit sequence. In the future, the first digit may be utilized in this numerical scheme to represent a predefined county subdivision.

References

External links

Lists of state and county FIPS codes for the United States can also be found at: * https://web.archive.org/web/20140330081907/http://www.census.gov/geo/reference/codes/cou.html * https://www.census.gov/geographies/reference-files/2020/demo/popest/2020-fips.html * https://www.census.gov/2010census/xls/fips_codes_website.xls * https://www.census.gov/prod/techdoc/cbp/cbp95/st-cnty.pdf * https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/home/?cid=nrcs143_013697 {{DEFAULTSORT:Fips County Code

Country code Country codes are short alphabetic or numeric geographical codes (geocodes) developed to represent countries and dependent areas, for use in data processing and communications. Several different systems have been developed to do this. The term '' ...

Standards of the United States

See also

References

External links