About PlainCities
PlainCities is a gazetteer of the United States built from the Census Bureau's files: 48,418 cities, towns, townships and census-designated places, 3,222 counties and 85,382 census tracts, each with who lives there, what households earn, what homes cost and how the place is changing, every estimate beside its margin of error.
Published · last revised
Why it exists
The Census Bureau publishes these figures in tables built for analysts: thousands of codes, one geography at a time, margins of error in separate columns. Readers who need one place's figures (a grant writer, a reporter, someone moving, a student) want them on one page, in plain sentences, compared with the county and the state, with a clear word on which figures they can rely on. That is what each PlainCities page does, and each data section names the Census Bureau file it comes from, with a link to the Bureau's page for it.
What it is not
PlainCities does not rate places, recommend where to live or score neighborhoods. It does not publish crime, climate, school or price data; each place and county page links the official source for each (the FBI's Crime Data Explorer, NOAA's climate normals and the NCES school search). Nothing here is financial, legal or real-estate advice.
What you will find on a page
Every place, county and census tract page opens with the same parts: a map key that shows where the page sits (state, county, place, tract), a one-paragraph entry with the population and the counties the place lies in, four headline figures with their margins drawn as a bar, and a list of the questions the page answers. Each section then answers one question in a sentence, shows the figures beside the county's and the state's, says for places, counties and states whether the figure changed since 2015-2019 (tracts were redrawn in 2020, so they are not compared), and ends with the Census Bureau file it came from and a link to its source.
How to use it
Search a name or an 11-digit GEOID from any page, or find a census tract from a street address with the tract lookup. Put up to four places side by side with the comparison tool, which marks only the differences the margins confirm. Every state has a CSV of its places you may reuse with a link back.
History
PlainCities launched in March 2026 with the 2019-2023 survey figures for U.S. places. The October 2026 edition reloaded every figure from the 2020-2024 release with its margins of error, added counties, published every census tract, rebuilt the rankings from reliable estimates only, and dropped figures that had been copied from other databases rather than loaded from their official sources. The changelog lists each edition and the corrections page each fix.
Who runs it
PlainCities belongs to Kiznis Studio, a small independent publisher in Lithuania; PlainCities is its site for the census record of U.S. places. The studio writes the data pipeline and the page templates with AI tools; the figures come from the Census Bureau's files and are checked against them before every release. PlainCities takes no payment from any place it covers. Advertising is meant to pay for it: every page loads Google AdSense's code, and ads will show once Google approves PlainCities.
Who checks it
The data editor is a role at Kiznis Studio, carried out with AI agents and scripts, not a named person. The checks it runs, with the date and result of the last run, are on the methodology page.
Contact and corrections
Write to hello@plaincities.com. A reported error is traced to its source file, fixed in the pipeline when the pipeline is at fault, and listed on the corrections page.