What City or Town Am I In?
Your device's location, checked against Census place boundaries in your browser. It handles unincorporated areas and says when a place is a CDP.
How this is calculated
- Your browser reports a latitude, longitude and accuracy value. MDN defines the accuracy as a radius in metres at 95% confidence.
- The page loads the small file for the one-degree square around you, cut from the Census 1:500,000 place boundaries. A place in that file is an incorporated city, town, village or borough, or a census designated place (CDP).
- A point-in-polygon test finds the place that contains your position. The Type line gives the kind of place, taken from the file's own name for it.
- If your position is inside no place, the page does not call that an error. It shows the county instead and says you are not inside an incorporated place or CDP in the Census file.
- If another place's edge is closer than your reported accuracy, a note names it.
Everything runs in your browser. The page asks our server only for the boundary file of your square. A point over open water or outside the Census coverage gives an error.
The Census file has no county subdivisions, so for unincorporated areas the page names the county, not a township or similar unit. The page does not know street addresses or neighbourhood names.
City, town, village, borough and CDP
The word a place uses for itself varies by state, and the Census file records it. In the 2024 file there are tens of thousands of places: more than 10,000 named city, more than 4,000 town, nearly 4,000 village, and over 12,000 census designated places. The result shows the name and the Type line shows which kind it is.
A census designated place is a statistical area that the Census Bureau draws for a settled community with no municipal government of its own. It has a name that people use, but it cannot pass local laws, so it is shown separately from incorporated places. If you need to know which government's rules apply to you, ask that government, starting with the county.
Why your mailing city can differ
The city on a letter comes from the postal system, which sorts mail by ZIP area and delivery route. The city this page names is the place whose boundary contains your position. They often match and sometimes do not: a house just outside a city's boundary may still be addressed with that city's name, because the post office that serves it sits there. The ZIP page explains why a ZIP area is not a boundary either.
If a form asks for your city, use the one on your mailing address unless it asks specifically where you live in legal terms. If it asks about the county, the county page is the right tool.
What this page does not give you
It does not name neighbourhoods, districts inside a city or street addresses. Those need a street-level geocoder, which cannot run inside a static page. For a full card with state and ZIP, use the home page, or the state page for the state alone.
Where the figures come from
- Census Bureau, Cartographic Boundary Files (place, 1:500,000). Checked 9 November 2026.
- MDN, GeolocationCoordinates (accuracy is in metres at 95% confidence). Checked 9 November 2026.
- Movable Type Scripts, calculate distance between latitude/longitude points (haversine). Checked 9 November 2026.