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
Louisiana County Map Maker
Louisiana has parishes rather than counties — 64 of them, and they work exactly like counties everywhere else. Download the free blank outline to print, or upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive Louisiana parish map you can embed anywhere.
Blank Louisiana map, free to download
All 64 parishes, 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 Louisiana map shows
Louisiana is the only state that calls its counties parishes — a survival of the colonial church parishes the territorial legislature adopted as civil divisions in 1807, and the reason a search for a Louisiana county map returns parishes. Functionally they are counties: the Census Bureau treats them as county equivalents, gives them county FIPS codes, and reports the same tables for them as for anywhere else. There are 64. The population sits along an arc from Shreveport down through Alexandria and across the Baton Rouge to New Orleans corridor, with Acadiana around Lafayette to the south-west and a rural, thinning north. The coastal parishes — Plaquemines, Terrebonne, Lafourche, Cameron, St. Bernard — are the ones to think about hardest: they are large on the page, small in population, and their outlines describe a coastline that is genuinely moving.
Three ways to draw Louisiana
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 Louisiana
Your data is reported by Louisiana parish
Louisiana Department of Health indicators, Workforce Commission employment figures, Department of Education enrolment and performance data, and Secretary of State election returns are all published by parish.
You are showing a rate or a share
Flood insurance take-up, uninsured rate, turnout, median household income. A rate is already adjusted for population, which is what shading a region needs.
The story is about the coast or the corridor
Storm exposure, land loss, evacuation, insurance and recovery money are all distributed geographically. On a parish map the pattern is the argument; in a table it is a list of names.
You need a blank map to print or fill in
Classroom exercises, parish-by-parish planning, colour-by-hand worksheets. The free outline above prints cleanly at any size.
When not to map Louisiana
You are mapping totals rather than rates
Shade by a raw count and East Baton Rouge, Jefferson and Orleans take the map every time. Use symbols or bubbles sized by the count instead.
Your unit is a municipality or a school system
Most school systems are parish-wide, but a handful of city systems sit inside them, and New Orleans is the one place where the municipality and the parish are the same thing. Check which you have before flattening it onto parishes.
The measure is really about the shoreline
Parish boundaries in the coastal zone include open water and marsh that has already gone. If you are mapping land loss itself, map the land, not the administrative shape around it.
The comparison is with other states
If the point is how Louisiana sits against Texas, Mississippi or the Gulf as a whole, use the US county map so the reader can see across the state line.
How to make a Louisiana 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 64 parishes — print it, or drop it into a document. To build with data, open the PlotSet Louisiana template, which loads with sample data already bound.
Prepare a parish column and a value column
One row per parish: the parish name or its five-digit FIPS code in the first column, your number in the second. Louisiana FIPS codes all begin 22.
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 parishes for a rate, or switch to symbols or bubbles for a count — which also stops the large, empty coastal parishes from dominating a map about people.
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 parish, or export a PNG, SVG or PDF for a report or a deck.
Start from the Louisiana template with sample data already loaded, then swap in your own.
Open the templateGetting your Louisiana data to join
What the place column has to look like, and where to find data that already matches.
Say parish in the labels, county in the search box
People look for a Louisiana county map and find parishes, which is fine — but a chart that labels them counties will look wrong to every reader in the state. The word in your title should be parish.
The Saint and St. parishes are the usual join failure
There are nine of them — St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. Helena, St. James, St. John the Baptist, St. Landry, St. Martin, St. Mary and St. Tammany. Sources disagree on St. versus Saint, and St. John the Baptist gets truncated and re-spaced constantly. Join on FIPS and none of it matters.
Watch the direction-prefixed pairs
East and West Baton Rouge, East and West Feliciana, East and West Carroll are six separate parishes. So are Jefferson and Jefferson Davis. Any of them can be silently collapsed by a partial-match join.
Where to get Louisiana parish data
The Louisiana Department of Health, the Louisiana Workforce Commission, the Department of Education and the Secretary of State all publish parish tables, as does the Census Bureau's American Community Survey.
Common mistakes on a Louisiana map
Calling them counties on the finished map
The search term is one thing; the label on the chart is another. Louisiana has parishes, and using the wrong word is the fastest way to lose a Louisiana audience.
Shading counts instead of rates
It produces a population map every time. Anything that grows simply because more people live there should be a sized symbol, not a shade.
Reading the coastal parishes as full of people
Plaquemines, Cameron and Terrebonne are among the biggest shapes on the map and among the emptiest. A dark colour there covers far fewer people than the same colour over Jefferson.
Joining on names without checking the Saints
St. Tammany, Saint Tammany and ST TAMMANY are three different strings. A mismatch leaves a blank parish rather than an error, so check the join count, not just the picture.
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 parish. Use one hue, light to dark.
Louisiana map questions
Parishes. Louisiana is the only state that uses the term — Alaska uses boroughs, and everywhere else uses counties. The Census Bureau treats parishes as county equivalents, so any dataset published by county covers Louisiana's parishes too.
Put your own data on the Louisiana map
Upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive map in a couple of minutes — free, no credit card.