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
Oregon County Map Maker
A blank Oregon county map to print, and a builder to fill it with your own data. Download the free outline of all 36 counties, or upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive Oregon map you can embed anywhere.
Blank Oregon map, free to download
All 36 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 Oregon map shows
Oregon's 36 counties are cut by a mountain range that runs down the state like a spine. West of the Cascades the counties are small and crowded: the Willamette Valley holds Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas, Marion, Lane and Benton, and with them the large majority of Oregonians, most of the farmland and nearly all of the rain. East of the Cascades the map opens out into counties the size of small countries — Harney, Malheur, Lake, Klamath — where sagebrush, cattle and federal land take the place of people, and Wheeler County counts its residents in four figures. The result is a map with a built-in illusion. Two-thirds of the visible surface belongs to the tenth of the state that lives out east, so any Oregon county map shaded by a raw number tells the reader about the Portland metro, and any Oregon county map shaded carelessly tells them about the desert. Knowing which of those you are drawing is most of the work.
Three ways to draw Oregon
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 Oregon
Your data is reported by Oregon county
Oregon Health Authority indicators, Employment Department labour figures, Secretary of State election returns, Department of Education school data and the PSU Population Research Center estimates are all published by county.
You are showing a rate or a share
Unemployment rate, share of the vote, uninsured rate, median income, percentage change since the last estimate. A rate is already adjusted for population, which is what shading a region needs.
You want to show the Cascade divide
Wet and dry, urban and rural, west and east: it is the organising fact of the state and it is a geographic fact. A county map makes it something the reader sees rather than something they have to be told.
You need a blank map to print or fill in
Classroom exercises, wildfire and watershed planning, territory splits, colour-by-hand sessions. The free outline above prints cleanly at any size.
When not to map Oregon
You are mapping totals rather than rates
Shade by a raw count and the tri-county Portland metro wins every time — Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas hold roughly two Oregonians in five between three of the smaller shapes on the map. Use symbols or bubbles sized by the count instead.
Your unit is a city, a metro or a watershed
Portland spills across the Columbia into Washington state, the Willamette basin ignores county lines entirely, and Oregon's regional government covers parts of three counties. Squeezing any of those onto counties misplaces what you are describing.
Only a few counties have data
A survey with a state-level sample rarely supports 36 estimates, and eastern counties are the first to fall below a reporting threshold. A map with twenty grey shapes is a worse table.
The measure is dominated by federal land
More than half of Oregon is federally owned, and the share is far higher east of the Cascades. Anything measured per acre or per square mile says more about the Bureau of Land Management than about the people living there.
How to make a Oregon 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 36 counties — print it, or drop it into a document. To build with data, open the PlotSet Oregon (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. Oregon FIPS codes all begin 41.
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 — and on a state this lopsided the choice does most of the work.
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 Oregon template with sample data already loaded, then swap in your own.
Open the templateGetting your Oregon data to join
What the place column has to look like, and where to find data that already matches.
All 36 counties, and one confusing name
Oregon has a Washington County, immediately south of the Columbia and the Washington state line. Any join that matches on name alone across several states will eventually put Oregon's data in the wrong place.
Half the names belong to other states too
Douglas, Jackson, Lincoln, Union, Grant, Lake, Marion, Polk and Columbia are all Oregon counties and all common county names elsewhere. Matching on FIPS avoids the whole class of problem.
Oregon FIPS codes start at 41
41001 is Baker, 41071 is Yamhill. Store the column as text so the leading 4 survives, and note that the county part is odd-numbered rather than sequential.
Where to get Oregon county data
The Oregon Health Authority, the Oregon Employment Department, the Secretary of State's election archive, the Portland State University Population Research Center — which produces the official state population estimates — and the Census Bureau's ACS.
Common mistakes on a Oregon map
Shading counts instead of rates
The Portland metro glows and the other 33 counties fade. Anything that grows simply because more people live there should be a sized symbol, not a shade.
Letting empty eastern Oregon carry the eye
Harney County covers more ground than several US states and holds around seven thousand people. One bright colour out there dominates a map otherwise about millions of Oregonians, so suppress low-count counties or say so in the caption.
Confusing Washington County with Washington state
It happens in joins, in filters and in copy. Write the state alongside the county name in any table a reader will see, and match on FIPS in the join itself.
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.
Oregon map questions
Yes. The outline above is a free SVG of all 36 Oregon 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 Oregon map
Upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive map in a couple of minutes — free, no credit card.