Shade each region
Colour intensity carries the value. The right choice for rates, shares and per-capita figures, which are already adjusted for how big or populous a region is.
Open the templateA blank Florida county map to print, and a builder to fill it with your own data. Download the free outline of all 67 counties, or upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive Florida map you can embed anywhere.
All 67 counties, as a clean outline. Print it, colour it in, or drop it into a document — no account and no attribution required.
Free for any use, including commercial and classroom. Generated from the same boundaries the builder uses.
Download SVGFlorida divides into 67 counties, and the state publishes almost everything at that level — health indicators, unemployment, school grades, property values, insurance claims, election returns. It is a geography worth mapping because the state does not behave as one place. The three southeast counties hold close to a third of the population between them, the I-4 corridor across the middle decides statewide elections, the Panhandle looks and votes more like south Alabama than like Miami, and Monroe County is mostly water and sawgrass with a thin line of keys attached. None of that survives a single statewide number, and all of it is visible on a county map.
Shade the regions when your number is a rate, size a marker when it is a count. Getting this backwards is the most common way a data map misleads.
Colour intensity carries the value. The right choice for rates, shares and per-capita figures, which are already adjusted for how big or populous a region is.
Open the templateOne symbol on each region, scaled by value. Use it for counts and totals, where shading the land area would just redraw the population map.
Open the templateCircles sized by value, sitting over the outline. Reads well when a few regions dominate and small ones would otherwise disappear into a shade.
Open the templateFlorida Health CHARTS indicators, FloridaCommerce labour figures, Department of Education school data, Division of Elections returns and county property appraiser rolls are all published by county.
Uninsured rate, share of residents over 65, vaccination share, share of the vote, median home price. Rates already account for how many people live there, which is what shading a region needs.
Florida's clearest divisions are geographic and they run against the compass — the further south you go the less Southern it gets. A county map turns that into something the reader can see rather than a claim they have to take on trust.
Classroom exercises, hurricane planning sessions, territory mark-ups, colour-by-hand worksheets. The free outline above prints cleanly at any size.
Shade by a raw count and Miami-Dade wins every time — roughly one Floridian in eight lives there. Use symbols or bubbles sized by the count instead.
Miami, Orlando and Tampa are all metro areas spanning several counties, and Jacksonville is a city consolidated with its whole county. Forcing city figures onto county shapes will misplace what you are describing.
Storm surge, beach erosion, flood exposure and reef damage happen along a line, not inside a polygon. A shaded county tells the reader that inland Collier and coastal Naples share a risk they do not share.
A map with fifty grey shapes and seventeen coloured ones is a worse bar chart. If coverage is patchy, rank the counties you do have.
From a spreadsheet to a published map, step by step.
The free outline above is a plain SVG of all 67 counties — print it, or drop it into a document. To build with data, open the PlotSet Florida (counties) template, which comes with sample data already bound.
One row per county: the county name or its five-digit FIPS code in the first column, your number in the second. FIPS codes for Florida all begin 12.
Import a CSV or Excel file, paste from a spreadsheet, or connect a Google Sheet so the map can be refreshed when the source updates.
Shade the counties for a rate, or switch to symbols or bubbles for a count. Same geography, same data, different encoding.
Sequential for a low-to-high measure, diverging only when a real midpoint exists — the state average, zero change, a 50 per cent line. Four to six steps read more precisely than a smooth gradient.
Publish for a live interactive map with a tooltip on every county, or export a PNG, SVG or PDF for a report or a deck.
Start from the Florida template with sample data already loaded, then swap in your own.
Open the templateWhat the place column has to look like, and where to find data that already matches.
Watch the ones that break a join: Miami-Dade, St. Johns, St. Lucie, DeSoto, Indian River, Palm Beach, Santa Rosa. Three of them start with a saint, two are two words that look like one, and matching on FIPS avoids all of it.
Older files, and plenty of current ones copied from older files, still say 'Dade'. It is the single most common reason a Florida map comes back with one large blank shape in the southeast.
12001 is Alachua, 12133 is Washington. Store the column as text so leading zeros survive, and note that the county part is odd-numbered rather than sequential.
The city and the county were consolidated in 1968, so city-level Jacksonville figures are county-level Duval figures. Every other big Florida city is a fraction of its county and does not map this way.
Florida Health CHARTS, FloridaCommerce labour statistics, the Department of Education, the Division of Elections and the University of Florida's Bureau of Economic and Business Research all publish county tables, as does the Census Bureau's ACS.
It produces a population map every time, and in Florida that map is three dark shapes in the southeast and a pale Panhandle. Anything that grows simply because more people live there should be a sized symbol.
Monroe is enormous on the map and tiny in population — most of it is Everglades and open water. On a shaded map it draws the eye to the least representative county in the state.
'St. Johns', 'St Johns' and 'Saint Johns' are three different strings, and a silent mismatch leaves a blank county rather than an error. Join on FIPS where you can.
Florida's county figures are shaped by who retires where. Sumter County is the oldest county in the country by median age; Alachua and Leon are two of the youngest because they hold the big universities. Any per-capita measure that correlates with age needs that said out loud.
A sequence of hues has no natural order, so readers cannot tell high from low without checking the legend on every county. Use one hue, light to dark.
Yes. The outline above is a free SVG of all 67 Florida counties — right-click to save it, print it, or drop it into a worksheet or document. No account needed.
Upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive map in a couple of minutes — free, no credit card.