The Least Populated US Counties

You could fit the entire population of America's emptiest county onto a single school bus and still have seats to spare. Loving County, Texas, is home to roughly 52 people, which makes it the least populated county in the United States. And it has plenty of company. Scattered across the West and the Great Plains is a small club of counties where the residents number in the dozens or low hundreds, where the county seat is a single unincorporated dot on the map, and where there is far more land, oil, or cattle than there are human beings. These are the emptiest of them all.

Loving County, Texas: The Emptiest of Them All

Loving County sits in far West Texas, right on the New Mexico border, and with about 52 residents it is the least populated county in the entire country. Its only community is Mentone, the county seat, a place so small it has long gone without a school and, for stretches, without so much as a gas station. What Loving County does have is oil. It sits in the heart of the Permian Basin, one of the most productive oil regions on Earth, which means this nearly empty patch of desert generates enormous mineral wealth for a population that could hold a town meeting in a single living room.

Kalawao, Hawaii: The County Built to Disappear

The second-smallest county has by far the strangest story. Kalawao County occupies a small peninsula on the north coast of Molokai, sealed off from the rest of the island by sea cliffs more than a thousand feet high. It was established in 1905 to administer a settlement where people diagnosed with leprosy, now known as Hansen's disease, were forcibly isolated for more than a century. Today its population of around 82 is made up largely of aging former patients who chose to stay, along with the state workers who care for them. It has no mayor, no county council, and no ordinary local government at all. Hawaii runs the place through its state Department of Health, and no one new moves in. In a very real sense, it is a county slowly winding itself down.

The Least Populous Counties, Ranked

Texas, Nebraska, and Montana own most of the bottom of the list, with Hawaii's one oddball county wedged in near the top. Here are the ten smallest, using the US Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 estimates.

The last two, Loup and Grant, sit close enough that the latest estimates leave them all but tied, and their order tends to swap from one vintage to the next.

The Texas Ranch Counties

Texas dominates the bottom of this list, and not by accident. King County, with about 192 people, is a West Texas ranching county whose seat, Guthrie, is not even an incorporated town. It also shares its name with a far more famous King County in Washington, the one that contains Seattle and roughly 2.3 million residents, which has to be one of the great name mismatches in American geography. Kenedy County, down in South Texas near the Gulf, holds around 319 people across nearly 2,000 square miles of ranchland, much of it tied to the historic King and Kenedy cattle empires. In both counties, the livestock comfortably outnumber the residents.

Nebraska's Empty Sandhills

The other capital of emptiness is the Nebraska Sandhills, a region of grass-covered dunes that is excellent for grazing cattle and stubbornly difficult for almost everything else. Five of the ten least populated counties in the country sit here. McPherson County (about 369 people), Arthur County (about 396), and Blaine County (about 458) anchor the cluster, with Loup and Grant counties (each around 570) close behind. They are all ranching counties with a single small village doing duty as the county seat. Arthur County is a near-perfect square that touches no state border and was named for President Chester A. Arthur, which may be the most attention he has gotten in a century.

Montana's Big Empty

Montana lands just one county in the national top ten, but it keeps a deep bench of runners-up. Petroleum County, with around 548 people, is the smallest. Its county seat, Winnett, counts fewer than 200 residents, and the county itself stretches across roughly 1,650 square miles, more land than the entire state of Rhode Island. Just behind it sit a handful of counties most Americans could not place on a map: Treasure County at around 770, Golden Valley County at roughly 840, and Wibaux County at under a thousand. None of them quite cracks the national bottom ten, but in most states a county this small would never have been drawn in the first place. Montana has a great deal of land and not many people to spread across it, and its eastern plains are the proof.

Why These Counties Stay Empty

There is a clear pattern to America's emptiest counties. Almost all of them sit in the arid West or the Great Plains, where the land is good for grazing cattle or pumping oil but hard on the kind of dense settlement that grows into towns. Many peaked decades ago and have been shrinking ever since, as young people leave for cities and ranches consolidate into fewer, larger operations. A few, like Kalawao, are accidents of history that never had a future to begin with. What all of them share is space without crowds: thousands of square miles of country where the population can still, quite literally, be counted by hand.