County Boundaries
Queryable Shapefile Has coordinates
All 255 Texas county boundaries as polygons, with FIPS codes.
Get the data
Heads up on Original: the Commission does not publish this table on its own. It publishes All Layers by County, which this was parsed out of — so Original gets you that whole file, not just this table. Every other format is this table alone.
Free. You will be asked to confirm an email address before the files are built — that is the only gate, and it is there so we can tell you when a large export is ready.
What this is
The Commission's own county boundaries -- 255 of them, which is 254 counties plus the federal offshore area -- with the FIPS code and the county name. 753,225 square kilometres including the offshore polygon.
Small, and the piece that makes every other layer on this site mappable: almost everything RRC publishes is keyed by county code, and this is what turns that code into a shape.
Geometry is stored on EPSG:4326, transformed once from the NAD27 the Commission publishes. That is the trap this data is famous for: NAD27 drawn on a modern basemap puts Texas features about 100 metres from where they belong and nothing looks wrong. The transform is checked rather than assumed -- RRC's well layer publishes each point on both datums, so the reprojection is compared against arithmetic the Commission did itself, and agrees to a median of 2 metres.
The shapefile packages are still mirrored whole, under the five 'Layers by County' datasets, for anyone who wants the Commission's own bytes.
What you can do with it
Draw a choropleth of anything county-keyed on this site -- production, permits, completions -- or clip another layer to a county.
Gotchas
255 rows, not 254. The extra is the federal offshore area, which is a real part of the statewide layer: dropping it silently loses every offshore well and still looks like a complete Texas map.
RRC publishes a second rendering of the same boundaries alongside this one. They are not identical, and this is the one carrying the FIPS code and the county name.
Record layout
7 columns.
gis_county_boundary
7 columns
| # | Column | Type | RRC name | Meaning | Lookup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
county_code
|
text | — | The three-digit county code, taken from the name of the package this row came out of. 'FED' for the federal offshore bundle, which is a real part of the statewide layer: merging only the numeric counties silently drops everything in federal waters and still looks like a complete Texas map. | — |
| 2 |
fips
|
text | — | The five-digit state-plus-county FIPS code, which is how this joins to Census geography and to anything published federally. 255 distinct values. | — |
| 3 |
county_nam
|
text | — | The county name as RRC prints it. | — |
| 4 |
shape_area
|
text | — | The area of the shape in the source file's own units on NAD27 degrees, as RRC computed it. Use ST_Area on the geometry if you want real units. | — |
| 5 |
shape_len
|
text | — | The length of the shape in the source file's own units on NAD27 degrees, as RRC computed it. Comparable between rows; not a survey measurement and not metres. | — |
| 6 |
geom
|
geometry | — | The shape, on EPSG:4326, transformed once from the NAD27 the Commission publishes. Served as WKT, which QGIS, PostGIS and ogr2ogr all read; the GeoJSON, GeoPackage, KML and Shapefile downloads are built from it. NAD27 drawn on a modern basemap is about 100 metres out, which is the reason this is transformed here rather than left to the reader. | — |
| 7 |
ingested_at
|
timestamptz | — | When the upstream pipeline last wrote this row. Not an RRC field — it is EZRRC's provenance stamp, and it is what the freshness badge is measured against. | — |
Where this comes from
- Published by
- Texas Railroad Commission — the original page
- Original format
- Shapefile ArcView shapefile — several files that must be kept together.
- RRC publishes
- Updated twice a week (Twice a week, with the county shapefile packages.)
- RRC download link
- GoAnywhere MFT
- Record layout manual
- Our table
texas.gis_county_boundary
EZRRC is an independent mirror of public-domain data published by the Texas Railroad Commission. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the RRC. For any legal or regulatory purpose, verify against the official RRC release.