The Most Populous County In America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 9, 11:12AM EDT

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The Most Populous County In America — © choness / iStock via Getty Images

The Census recently came out with its “Growth in the Nation’s Largest Counties Rebounds in 2022.” It reviewed the population increase or decline in the country’s largest 3,144 counties between 2020 and 2022. Based on this data, the largest country by far is Los Angeles County, with a population of 9,721,138. This number was from July 2022. The figure had dropped from the April 2020 Census when the figure was 10,041,042. It had the largest numeric drop in any country over that period.

Los Angeles County has a larger population than 40 states.

The next largest county in the US is Cook County which includes Chicago, with a population of 5,109,292. It is followed by Harris County, which had a population of 4,780,913. Harris County included Houston.

Los Angeles Country covers several large cities. Los Angeles itself has a population of 3.8 million. The county also encompasses Santa Clara, Santa Monica, Pasadena, and Torrance.

California was broken into some counties as early as 1850. One of these was Los Angeles County. Then, the country stretched as far east as the border with Nevada. It was broken into several counties in the 1850s and 1860s.

The county is huge. It covers 4,751 square miles. Elevation in the county runs from zero feet above sea level to 10,068 feet above sea level.

The median personal income in the country is $30,654, slightly below the US figure. Los Angeles County has the largest homeless population in the US at about 50,000.

These are seven American cities that have lost more than half their population.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.