FIPS Codes

Federal Information Processing Standards codes (FIPS codes) are a standardized set of numeric or alphabetic codes issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to ensure uniform identification of geographic entities through all federal government agencies.

The entities covered include: states and statistically equivalent entities, counties and statistically equivalent entities, named populated and related location entities (such as, places and county subdivisions), and American Indian and Alaska Native areas.

Many FIPS standards are modified versions of standards used in the wider community (ANSI, IEEE, ISO, and so on).

The following illustration shows breakdown of FIPS codes and their interconnection.