Shade each region
Colour intensity carries the value. The right choice for rates, shares and per-capita figures, which are already adjusted for how big or populous a region is.
Open the templateAll maps
Georgia County Map Maker
A blank Georgia county map to print, and a builder to fill it with your own data. Download the free outline of all 159 counties, or upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive Georgia map you can embed anywhere.
Blank Georgia map, free to download
All 159 counties, as a clean outline. Print it, colour it in, or drop it into a document — no account and no attribution required.
Free for any use, including commercial and classroom. Generated from the same boundaries the builder uses.
Download SVGWhat a Georgia map shows
Georgia has 159 counties — more than any state except Texas, and a legacy of the era when a county was meant to be a day's ride from end to end and every one of them carried weight in state politics. The result is a map with unusually fine resolution and unusually uneven contents. Metro Atlanta's millions sit in a tight knot of small shapes in the north — Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, DeKalb, Clayton and the ring beyond them — while more than a hundred counties across middle and south Georgia are rural, and dozens have fewer than 10,000 residents. Taliaferro County has around 1,500 people; Fulton has over a million. That gap is the first thing to design around: on a Georgia county map, area and population point in opposite directions, and the eye reads area.
Three ways to draw Georgia
Shade the regions when your number is a rate, size a marker when it is a count. Getting this backwards is the most common way a data map misleads.
A sized marker per region
One symbol on each region, scaled by value. Use it for counts and totals, where shading the land area would just redraw the population map.
Open the templateProportional circles
Circles sized by value, sitting over the outline. Reads well when a few regions dominate and small ones would otherwise disappear into a shade.
Open the templateWhen to map Georgia
Your data is reported by Georgia county
Department of Public Health indicators through OASIS, Department of Labor employment figures, Department of Education enrolment, and Secretary of State election returns are all published by county.
You are showing a rate or a share
Uninsured rate, turnout, poverty rate, share of households with broadband. Rates are already adjusted for population, which is what shading a region needs.
You want the metro–rural contrast to be visible
Georgia's clearest divide is geographic: the Atlanta commuter counties, the fall-line cities, and the rural south. Ranked lists hide that pattern; a map states it.
You need a blank map to print or fill in
Classroom exercises, territory planning, colour-by-hand worksheets. The free outline above prints cleanly at any size and holds all 159 boundaries.
When not to map Georgia
You are mapping totals rather than rates
Shade by a raw count and you have drawn metro Atlanta, whatever the measure was. Use symbols or bubbles sized by the count instead.
You have fewer than a dozen values
With 159 shapes to fill, a handful of counties with data leaves an almost entirely grey map. Rank what you have, or aggregate to the twelve state service regions.
Your unit is a city or a school district
Georgia has both county and city school systems, and Atlanta alone spans Fulton and DeKalb. Several counties — Athens-Clarke, Augusta-Richmond, Columbus-Muscogee and Macon-Bibb — are consolidated with their city, and most are not.
The comparison is with other states
If the point is how Georgia sits against Florida, Alabama or the South as a whole, use the US county map so the reader can see across the state line.
How to make a Georgia map
From a spreadsheet to a published map, step by step.
Download the blank map, or start from the template
The free outline above is a plain SVG of all 159 counties — print it, or drop it into a document. To build with data, open the PlotSet Georgia (counties) template, which loads with sample data already bound.
Prepare a county column and a value column
One row per county: the county name or its five-digit FIPS code in the first column, your number in the second. Georgia FIPS codes all begin 13.
Upload or connect your data
Import a CSV or Excel file, paste from a spreadsheet, or connect a Google Sheet so the map can be refreshed when the source updates.
Pick the style that fits the measure
Shade the counties for a rate, or switch to symbols or bubbles for a count. With 159 counties, sized markers also solve the problem of a big empty county outweighing a crowded small one.
Use fewer colour steps than you think
At this resolution most shapes are small. Four or five clearly separated steps are readable; a smooth gradient across 159 counties turns into texture.
Publish, embed or export
Publish for a live interactive map with a tooltip on every county — the practical way to name 159 shapes — or export a PNG, SVG or PDF.
Start from the Georgia template with sample data already loaded, then swap in your own.
Open the templateGetting your Georgia data to join
What the place column has to look like, and where to find data that already matches.
Three county names are written two ways
The Census writes DeKalb, McDuffie and McIntosh; the boundaries behind this map write De Kalb, Mc Duffie and Mc Intosh. Same counties, different strings, and a name join drops whichever form your file does not use.
Georgia FIPS codes start at 13
13001 is Appling, 13321 is Worth. The county part is odd-numbered rather than sequential, so do not try to derive it. Store the column as text so the codes keep their shape.
Watch the names that exist in several states
Jackson, Jefferson, Johnson, Madison, Monroe, Union and Washington are all Georgia counties and all common elsewhere. If your source is national, filter to state FIPS 13 before you join.
Where to get Georgia county data
The Department of Public Health's OASIS system, the Georgia Department of Labor, the Department of Education and the Secretary of State all publish county tables, as does the Census Bureau's American Community Survey.
Common mistakes on a Georgia map
Shading counts instead of rates
It produces a population map every time. Anything that grows simply because more people live there should be a sized symbol, not a shade.
Labelling every county
159 labels will not fit at any size a reader will actually look at. Label the dozen that carry the argument and leave the rest to the tooltip.
Letting area speak for importance
Ware County is the largest on the page and holds about 35,000 people; Clayton is a fraction of the size with about eight times as many. Say so in the caption, or pair the map with a bar chart.
Trusting rates from tiny counties
A county of 1,500 people can swing from best to worst in the state on a handful of cases. Suppress or flag small denominators rather than letting them set the colour scale.
Using a rainbow colour scale
A sequence of hues has no natural order, so readers cannot tell high from low without checking the legend on every county. Use one hue, light to dark.
Georgia map questions
Yes. The outline above is a free SVG of all 159 Georgia counties — right-click to save it, print it, or drop it into a worksheet or document. No account needed.
Put your own data on the Georgia map
Upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive map in a couple of minutes — free, no credit card.