The Median County Property File in Each State

The average county file in a state is easy to compute and easy to misread, because one very large county can lift it far above what most of the state’s counties contain. The median avoids that: half of a state’s counties have larger files and half have smaller. This report gives the median county file for each of the 51 states and the District of Columbia in the October 2026 edition of the county index.

Across every county in the index, the median file holds 13,414 property records. 27 states have a higher median than that and 24 have a lower one; the states above it hold 63.0% of all records in the index. The District of Columbia has the highest state median, 215,777 records, and Alaska the lowest, 628: a typical county file in the first is 344 times the size of a typical one in the second.

Median county, all states

13,414

Highest state median (DC)

215,777

Lowest state median (AK)

628

States above the national median

27

What sets a state’s median

Two things largely decide where a state lands in Table 1: how much property it has and how many counties that property is divided into. A state with a modest total split into few counties can have a higher median than a far larger state split into many. The county column is therefore worth reading next to the median. A low median in a state with many counties says that most of its files are small, not that the state as a whole is small.

In states with five counties or fewer, Delaware, Hawaii and Rhode Island, the median is one of a handful of files and moves with that county’s own count. The District of Columbia is filed as a single county-level area, so the median, the largest file and the state total are the same number and the gap is zero.

Median against average

In 48 of the 50 states with more than one county, the average county file is larger than the median. That is the usual pattern when a few large files sit above many smaller ones. The difference is greatest in Alaska, where the average file of 9,490 records is 15.1 times the median of 628. In the other 2, the median is at or above the average, which means the state’s files are spread fairly evenly or its smaller counties are close in size to its larger ones.

The gap between the largest and the median

The last two columns of Table 1 compare each state’s middle file with its largest. The widest gap in relative terms is in Illinois, where Cook County holds 145.0 times as many records as the median county. The narrowest is in Delaware, where the largest file is 1.2 times the median. In 36 states the largest county is at least ten times the median. Figure 1 shows the 15 states where the multiple is highest.

A large multiple means a state is two markets in one: a big file at the top and a long run of much smaller counties below it. A small multiple means the largest county is only a step above the rest, and a buyer choosing between the state’s counties will find files of broadly similar size. Share of the state total, as reported in the largest county in every state, answers a related but different question: how much of the state the top file covers, rather than how it compares with a typical county.

The median file at a flat price

Every county costs the same $19/mo, so the size of a typical file sets what a typical record costs. At the median, records are cheapest in the District of Columbia, about 8.8¢ per thousand records a month, and dearest in Alaska, about $30.25 per thousand. These figures describe the middle county, not every county: within any state, the largest file costs less per record and the smallest costs more. The five-county bundle, any 5 for $49/mo, lowers the price of each file and narrows the difference.

Method

Each state’s counties are ranked by property records in the October 2026 edition, ties broken by name. With an odd number of counties the median is the middle file; with an even number it is the average of the two middle files, rounded to a whole record. The national median is taken across every county in the index. All figures are recalculated daily from the county index. For state totals and averages, see property records by state.

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