Random US City Generator

How this list was compiled: 846 rows picked by rule, from the US Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 City and Town Population Totals (https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/datasets/2020-2025/cities/totals/sub-est2025.csv, checked 2026-09-18; on 2026-09-19 the live file was still the 7,464,556 bytes of the copy read here): every incorporated place with 50,000 people or more on 1 July 2025 (824 places, 39 of them with 500,000 or more), the three largest places in every state, and every state capital. That file holds 19,483 incorporated places and consolidated cities, 3,224 of them with 10,000 people or more. The list began as 174 rows; the 672 places between 50,000 people and the old cut were added on 2026-09-19 by the same rules, so a state's list is as long as its count of cities that size. Populations, the rank in the state and the rank in the US are computed from the same file, and places with the same estimate share the higher rank (Casper, Wyoming and Pocatello, Idaho are both 696th); for consolidated city-counties (Indianapolis, Nashville, Louisville and others) the bureau's 'balance' figure is used. Hawaii has no incorporated places, so the file carries one Hawaii row, Urban Honolulu, and the list has one Hawaii city. Washington, D.C. is included as a city and marked as outside every state. Connecticut's county-level areas are its nine planning regions, which the bureau has used in place of the eight old counties since 2022. A county is named alone when it holds 95% or more of the city's people, and as 'Mostly in' below that; x.counties lists every county the city reaches. The county is the one holding the largest share of the city's people in the file's county-part rows. Coordinates (the bureau's internal point), land area and postal codes are from the 2025 Gazetteer place file (https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/maps-data/data/gazetteer/2025_Gazetteer/2025_Gaz_place_national.zip, checked 2026-09-18). Regions are the Census Bureau's four regions, read from https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/datasets/2020-2025/state/totals/NST-EST2025-ALLDATA.csv. State capitals were checked against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_capitals_in_the_United_States (checked 2026-09-18). Locator pictures are drawn from the bureau's 2024 cartographic boundary file cb_2024_us_state_20m (https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/GENZ2024/shp/cb_2024_us_state_20m.zip). Licence: Own work. Figures are US Census Bureau data, which is in the public domain; the wording of every line is ours.