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
Minnesota County Map Maker
A blank Minnesota county map to print, and a builder to fill it with your own data. Download the free outline of all 87 counties, or upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive Minnesota map you can embed anywhere.
Blank Minnesota map, free to download
All 87 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 Minnesota map shows
Minnesota divides into 87 counties, and the state reports most of what it measures at that level — unemployment, health outcomes, school enrolment, crop yields, turnout, broadband coverage. The counties are a genuinely useful unit here because they are drawn small enough in the settled south and east to separate one farm economy from the next, while the north is carved into a handful of very large counties that hold forest, iron and water more than they hold people. That mismatch between area and population is the whole story of the state's geography, and a county map shows it in one picture.
Three ways to draw Minnesota
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 Minnesota
Your data is reported by Minnesota county
MDH health indicators, DEED labour and wage figures, Department of Education enrolment data, USDA crop statistics and Secretary of State election returns are all published by county.
You are showing a rate or a share
Unemployment rate, uninsured share, share of households with broadband, share of the vote, median household income. Rates are already adjusted for population, which is what shading a region needs.
You want to show metro against greater Minnesota
The seven-county Twin Cities metro holds over half the state in a corner of the map. A county map makes that concentration an argument the reader can see rather than a statistic they have to hold in their head.
You need a blank map to print or fill in
Classroom exercises, extension and county-fair materials, planning workshops, colour-by-hand sessions. The free outline above prints cleanly at any size.
When not to map Minnesota
You are mapping totals rather than rates
Shade by a raw count and Hennepin County wins every time — roughly one Minnesotan in five lives there, in one of the smaller shapes on the map. Use symbols or bubbles sized by the count instead.
Your unit is a city or a school district
Minneapolis and St. Paul are two cities in two different counties inside one metro, and Minnesota's school districts cross county lines freely. Mapping either onto counties will misplace the thing you are describing.
The comparison is with Wisconsin or the Dakotas
If the point is how Minnesota sits against its neighbours, use the US county map so the reader can see across the state line instead of stopping at it.
Only a few counties have data
Rural county samples are small, and suppressed cells are common in health data. A map with sixty grey shapes and twenty-seven coloured ones is a worse bar chart — rank the counties you do have.
How to make a Minnesota 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 87 counties — print it, or drop it into a document. To build with data, open the PlotSet Minnesota (counties) template, which comes 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. FIPS codes for Minnesota all begin 27.
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. Same geography, same data, different encoding.
Choose a colour scale on purpose
Sequential for a low-to-high measure, diverging only when a real midpoint exists — the state average, zero change, a 50 per cent line. Four to six steps read more precisely than a smooth gradient.
Publish, embed or export
Publish for a live interactive map with a tooltip on every county, or export a PNG, SVG or PDF for a report or a deck.
Start from the Minnesota template with sample data already loaded, then swap in your own.
Open the templateGetting your Minnesota data to join
What the place column has to look like, and where to find data that already matches.
All 87 counties, spelled as the state spells them
The ones that break a join are the French and the doubled names: Lac qui Parle, Le Sueur, Mille Lacs, Otter Tail, Yellow Medicine, Blue Earth, Big Stone. Watch the pairs too — Lake and Lake of the Woods, Red Lake and Clearwater, are four separate counties that people routinely collapse into two.
St. Louis County is in Minnesota as well as Missouri
Minnesota's St. Louis County runs from Duluth to the Canadian border and is the largest county by area east of the Mississippi. Any national dataset joined on name alone will happily hand its rows to Missouri.
Minnesota FIPS codes start at 27
27001 is Aitkin, 27173 is Yellow Medicine. Store the column as text so the codes keep their shape, and remember the county part is odd-numbered, not sequential.
The metro is seven counties, not one
Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey, Scott and Washington. Metro-level figures spread across all seven, and any map that treats 'the Twin Cities' as a single unit is drawing a region the data does not have.
Where to get Minnesota county data
The Minnesota Department of Health, DEED, the Department of Education, the Office of the Secretary of State and the State Demographic Center all publish county tables, as does the Census Bureau's ACS.
Common mistakes on a Minnesota map
Shading counts instead of rates
It produces a population map every time: a dark cluster around the Twin Cities and pale everywhere else. Anything that grows simply because more people live there should be a sized symbol, not a shade.
Letting the northern counties dominate the picture
St. Louis, Koochiching, Itasca, Beltrami and Cass cover an enormous share of the map and hold a small share of the people. On a shaded map they carry visual weight that their populations do not justify — say so in the caption.
Joining on names without checking spelling
'Lac qui Parle' and 'Lac Qui Parle' are different strings, and a silent mismatch leaves a blank county rather than an error. Join on FIPS where you can.
Suppressed data drawn as zero
Health and education releases blank out small counts for privacy. Import those cells as empty rather than as 0, or the sparsest counties will read as the healthiest ones on the map.
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.
Minnesota map questions
Yes. The outline above is a free SVG of all 87 Minnesota 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 Minnesota map
Upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive map in a couple of minutes — free, no credit card.