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
Pennsylvania County Map Maker
A blank Pennsylvania county map to print, and a builder to fill it with your own data. Download the free outline of all 67 counties, or upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive Pennsylvania map you can embed anywhere.
Blank Pennsylvania map, free to download
All 67 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 Pennsylvania map shows
Pennsylvania divides into 67 counties, and the state's shape does a lot of the explaining. Philadelphia sits in the far south-east corner, coterminous with its county and the densest place in the state by a wide margin. Allegheny, holding Pittsburgh, sits at the opposite end in the south-west. Between them run roughly fifty counties of ridge, valley and small town, several of which have fewer than 20,000 residents — Cameron County has around 4,500. Almost every Pennsylvania statistic ends up being about that arrangement: two metropolitan poles, a long rural middle, and a set of suburban collar counties around Philadelphia that behave like neither. It is also why Pennsylvania county maps are drawn so often at election time, and why the same map with the same data can support two opposite headlines depending on whether you shaded the land or sized the people.
Three ways to draw Pennsylvania
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 Pennsylvania
Your data is reported by Pennsylvania county
Department of Health indicators, Department of Labor and Industry unemployment figures, Department of Education enrolment and Department of State election returns are all published by county.
You are showing a rate or a share
Unemployment rate, overdose deaths per 100,000, broadband coverage, share of the vote. Rates are already adjusted for population, which is what shading a region needs.
You want to show the two-pole structure
The gap between the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh metros and the counties between them runs through income, health, age and turnout alike. On a county map it reads as one picture rather than a paragraph.
You need a blank map to print or fill in
Classroom exercises, canvassing plans, colour-by-hand sessions. The free outline above prints cleanly at any size.
When not to map Pennsylvania
You are mapping totals rather than rates
Shade by a raw count and Philadelphia, Allegheny and the collar counties win every time — the south-east alone holds roughly a third of the state. Use symbols or bubbles sized by the count instead.
Your unit is a municipality or a school district
Pennsylvania has more than 2,500 municipalities and around 500 school districts, and they do not nest neatly inside counties. Mapping either onto 67 shapes will misplace what you are describing.
You are comparing city neighbourhoods
Philadelphia County is one shape whether Chestnut Hill and Kensington look alike or nothing alike. Below the county line, use ZIP codes, wards or census tracts.
Only a few counties have data
A map with fifty grey shapes and seventeen coloured ones is a worse bar chart. If coverage is patchy, rank the counties you do have.
How to make a Pennsylvania 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 67 counties — print it, or drop it into a document. To build with data, open the PlotSet Pennsylvania (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 Pennsylvania all begin 42.
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 Pennsylvania template with sample data already loaded, then swap in your own.
Open the templateGetting your Pennsylvania data to join
What the place column has to look like, and where to find data that already matches.
McKean is written 'Mc Kean' in this geography
The template's county names carry a space: 'Mc Kean', not 'McKean'. If your source spells it the usual way, that one row will silently fail to join and leave a blank county in the north. Matching on FIPS avoids it entirely.
Centre County is spelled the British way
Centre, not Center — it is the home of State College and Penn State. Any pipeline that normalises American spellings will quietly rename it and lose the join.
Four Pennsylvania counties are named after other states
Delaware, Indiana, Washington and Wyoming are all Pennsylvania counties. In a national table, filtering on those names without a state column will pull in the wrong rows — and Washington County, Pennsylvania is a particularly common false match.
Pennsylvania FIPS codes start at 42
42001 is Adams, 42133 is York. Store the column as text so the digits survive, and note that the county part is odd-numbered rather than sequential.
Where to get Pennsylvania county data
The Department of Health, the Department of Labor and Industry, the Department of Education, the Department of State and the Department of Environmental Protection all publish county tables, as does the Census Bureau's ACS.
Common mistakes on a Pennsylvania 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.
Reading area as votes on an election map
Pennsylvania is the state this mistake is made on most. Fifty lightly populated counties can cover most of the map while holding a minority of the electorate — if you are mapping results, size the symbols by turnout or say plainly what the shading means.
Joining on names without checking spelling
'Mc Kean' versus 'McKean' and 'Centre' versus 'Center' are the two that bite here, and a silent mismatch leaves a blank shape rather than an error. Join on FIPS where you can.
Treating Philadelphia as a city and a county at once
They are the same boundary, so city-level and county-level figures for Philadelphia are interchangeable — but only for Philadelphia. Do not assume the same holds for Pittsburgh, which is part of a much larger Allegheny County.
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.
Pennsylvania map questions
Yes. The outline above is a free SVG of all 67 Pennsylvania 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 Pennsylvania map
Upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive map in a couple of minutes — free, no credit card.