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 templateAll maps
Indiana County Map Maker
A blank Indiana county map to print, and a builder to fill it with your own data. Download the free outline of all 92 counties, or upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive Indiana map you can embed anywhere.
Blank Indiana map, free to download
All 92 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 SVGWhat a Indiana map shows
Indiana divides into 92 counties, and almost everything the state measures is reported at that level — unemployment, overdose deaths, school enrolment, corn and soybean yields, turnout, broadband coverage. Unlike the western states, Indiana's counties are small and fairly even in size, which makes a county map here read more like a grid than like a landscape: no single shape dominates the picture the way a desert county does out west. What varies is the population inside them. Marion County holds Indianapolis, the seven counties ringing it hold the fastest growth in the state, and the far northwest corner belongs to Chicago more than it belongs to Indianapolis — three facts a county map shows at once.
Three ways to draw Indiana
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.
A sized marker per region
One 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 templateProportional circles
Circles 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 templateWhen to map Indiana
Your data is reported by Indiana county
Indiana Department of Health indicators, Department of Workforce Development labour figures, Department of Education enrolment, USDA crop statistics and Secretary of State election returns are all published by county.
You are showing a rate or a share
Unemployment rate, overdose deaths per 100,000, share of adults with a bachelor's degree, share of the vote, median household income. Rates are already adjusted for population, which is exactly what shading a region needs.
You want to show the Indianapolis donut
Hamilton, Hendricks, Johnson, Boone, Hancock, Morgan and Shelby ring Marion County, and on most economic measures they look nothing like the county at the centre. That contrast is a ring on a map and a paragraph in prose.
You need a blank map to print or fill in
Classroom work, county extension materials, planning workshops, colour-by-hand exercises. The free outline above prints cleanly at any size.
When not to map Indiana
You are mapping totals rather than rates
Shade by a raw count and Marion County wins every time, with Lake and Allen behind it. Anything that grows simply because more people live somewhere belongs on a sized symbol, not a shade.
Your unit is a city or a school corporation
Fort Wayne, Evansville and South Bend each sit inside a county that is larger than the city, and Indiana's school corporations cross county lines freely. Mapping either onto counties will misplace the thing you are describing.
The story is really about a metro that crosses the state line
Lake, Porter and LaPorte belong to the Chicago metro; Clark and Floyd belong to Louisville. If that is the comparison, use the US county map so the reader can see across the border instead of stopping at it.
Only a few counties have data
Rural county samples are small and suppressed cells are common in health data. A map with sixty grey shapes and thirty-two coloured ones is a worse bar chart — rank the counties you do have.
How to make a Indiana map
From a spreadsheet to a published map, step by step.
Download the blank map, or start from the template
The free outline above is a plain SVG of all 92 counties — print it, or drop it into a document. To build with data, open the PlotSet Indiana (counties) template, which comes with sample data already bound.
Prepare a county column and a value column
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 Indiana all begin 18.
Upload or connect your data
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.
Pick the style that fits the measure
Shade the counties for a rate, or switch to symbols or bubbles for a count. Same geography, same data, different encoding.
Choose a colour scale on purpose
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, embed or export
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 Indiana template with sample data already loaded, then swap in your own.
Open the templateGetting your Indiana data to join
What the place column has to look like, and where to find data that already matches.
All 92 counties, spelled as the state spells them
The ones that break a join are the run-together names: LaPorte, LaGrange, DeKalb and Vanderburgh are written as one word by the state and as two — or misspelled "Vanderburg" — by nearly everyone else. St. Joseph carries a full stop. Tippecanoe, Wabash and Kosciusko are frequently mistyped.
Marion County and Indianapolis are the same shape
Unigov consolidated the two in 1970, so city figures and county figures are usually the same number. They are not always: Beech Grove, Lawrence, Southport and Speedway kept their own governments inside the county, so some municipal series exclude them and some do not.
Indiana FIPS codes start at 18
18001 is Adams, 18183 is Whitley. Store the column as text so the codes keep their shape, and remember the county part is odd-numbered rather than sequential.
Indiana is split across two time zones
Most of the state is Eastern; a dozen counties in the northwest and southwest run on Central time. Any dataset with a timestamp — hospital admissions, 911 calls, poll closing times — needs to say which zone it is in before the county map means anything.
Where to get Indiana county data
STATS Indiana at the Indiana Business Research Center is the usual first stop; the Indiana Department of Health, the Department of Workforce Development, the Department of Education and the Census Bureau's ACS all publish county tables directly.
Common mistakes on a Indiana map
Shading counts instead of rates
It produces a population map every time: dark at Indianapolis, dark in the northwest corner, pale across the farm counties. Anything that grows with population should be a sized symbol.
Assuming Ohio County is in Ohio
Indiana's smallest county by area is called Ohio, and Kentucky and West Virginia have counties of the same name. A national dataset joined on name alone will scatter its rows across three states.
Losing the small counties in the shading
Ohio, Switzerland, Blackford, Vermillion and Union are tiny on the page. If one of them is the story, label it directly or add an inset — a reader will not find a two-pixel shape on their own.
Suppressed data drawn as zero
Health and education releases blank out small counts for privacy. Import those cells as empty rather than as 0, or the sparsest counties will read as the healthiest ones on the map.
Using a rainbow colour scale
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.
Indiana map questions
Yes. The outline above is a free SVG of all 92 Indiana counties — right-click to save it, print it, or drop it into a worksheet or document. No account needed.
Put your own data on the Indiana map
Upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive map in a couple of minutes — free, no credit card.