Government Land Ownership by State

How much of each state is in government hands? This table measures it the way an assessment roll can: the share of parcels whose recorded owner is a federal, state, or local government entity, classified from owner names and weighted across every county on file. Parcel share is not acreage share — one national forest can out-measure ten thousand town lots — but it is measurable everywhere, uniformly, which an acreage figure is not.

#	State	Government-held parcels	Parcels on file	Counties
1	Montana	7.2%	23,008	2
2	Minnesota	5.5%	3,177,557	86
3	South Dakota	3.8%	428,595	33
4	Indiana	3.2%	1,467,281	41
5	Utah	3.2%	532,019	7
6	Nebraska	3.1%	269,759	27
7	Oklahoma	3.0%	2,374,946	76
8	North Dakota	2.9%	326,602	28
9	Idaho	2.8%	740,934	24
10	Colorado	2.5%	929,285	26
11	New Mexico	2.4%	1,146,542	21
12	Iowa	2.2%	1,395,651	63
13	New York	2.2%	2,680,537	29
14	Oregon	2.1%	1,678,945	26
15	New Hampshire	2.0%	43,999	2
16	Rhode Island	1.9%	337,996	5
17	Ohio	1.8%	4,551,304	60
18	Texas	1.8%	9,680,173	209
19	Illinois	1.7%	5,340,180	100
20	Wisconsin	1.7%	343,837	3
21	Michigan	1.7%	4,198,994	67
22	Arkansas	1.7%	430,549	17
23	West Virginia	1.6%	974,122	38
24	New Jersey	1.6%	406,973	6
25	Nevada	1.5%	1,046,695	9
26	Mississippi	1.5%	1,918,810	76
27	Washington	1.4%	1,592,506	11
28	Missouri	1.2%	3,296,865	103
29	Wyoming	1.1%	274,883	16
30	Kansas	1.1%	1,371,332	100
31	Alaska	1.1%	104,179	3
32	Florida	1.1%	1,033,336	10
33	California	1.1%	7,786,703	40
34	North Carolina	1.0%	1,716,603	19
35	Arizona	1.0%	2,848,326	11
36	Louisiana	1.0%	2,331,876	57
37	Alabama	1.0%	2,785,432	61
38	Pennsylvania	1.0%	4,767,598	52
39	Virginia	0.9%	1,542,184	37
40	Maine	0.9%	113,522	3
41	Connecticut	0.9%	306,109	2
42	Georgia	0.9%	4,288,718	136
43	South Carolina	0.8%	2,908,759	46
44	Tennessee	0.7%	3,007,725	74
45	Delaware	0.5%	82,983	1
46	Kentucky	0.5%	2,085,234	105

How Owners Are Classified

A parcel counts as government-held when its recorded owner name matches anchored patterns for federal, state, local, or tribal entities — “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”, “STATE OF MONTANA”, “CITY OF AUSTIN”. The patterns are conservative on purpose: a business with a place-name inside it does not classify as government, so if this table errs, it errs low. Coverage varies with what each state’s counties deliver; see data sources.