Most Common City Names in the US: Franklin, Then Clinton and Madison

Ask the internet for the most common city name in America and you get three different answers: Washington, Springfield or Fairview. Each one comes from a different list, and none of the pages says which list. So we counted again from the two primary files, the Census Bureau's 2025 Gazetteer ^[gazetteer] and the USGS place-name database ^[gnis]. The answer is Franklin, by a clear margin, and you can download the full results as CSV.

The counting rule matters, so this page shows three counts side by side and explains each. If you need a fictional US address that uses a real city and a ZIP code USPS actually issues there, the random address generator builds one in a click. The most common city names below are exactly the ones that make a test address look ordinary.

The 50 most common city names in the US

This table counts incorporated places: cities, towns, villages and boroughs with an active government, in the 50 states and DC. A name counts once per place whatever its legal form, so Franklin city and Franklin village are both Franklin. The 'All places' column adds census designated places (CDPs), which are unincorporated communities the Census draws a boundary around. The GNIS column counts every populated place in the USGS database with exactly that name.

Almost every name on the list appears once per state. The exceptions are Franklin, Liberty and Centerville, and in each case the doubled state is Pennsylvania, whose boroughs and cities can share a name. Three kinds of name fill the top 50: surnames of famous Americans, English towns such as Manchester, Oxford and Cambridge, and plain descriptions such as Fairview, Springfield and Centerville. The full CSV runs to 300 names.

Franklin, Fairview or Midway? Three ways to count

The Census publishes 32,350 places for the states, DC and Puerto Rico ^[gazetteer]. Of those, 19,471 are incorporated places with an active government, and 12,540 are CDPs. The USGS Geographic Names Information System is a different kind of list. It records 187,784 populated places in the 50 states and DC, from big cities down to crossroads hamlets and historic communities ^[gnis]. A name like Midway or Oak Grove can be a crossroads in hundreds of counties and still be an incorporated town in only ten.

This is why the lists disagree. Mental Floss, using USGS data in 2023, put Fairview first with 288 populated places and Midway second with 256 ^{[mentalfloss]}. Our 2025 GNIS file gives 211 and 217, so the two have swapped and both have fallen; the USGS edits its database continuously, and we have not tried to reconcile the two vintages. The same article counted 28 incorporated Franklins, with Clinton, Madison and Washington tied at 27. 24/7 Wall St, working from Census survey tables in 2022, found 32 Franklins ^[247]. Our stricter rule, active governments only, gives 26.

Visual Capitalist's 2024 map answers a narrower question: which names are shared by cities of at least 20,000 people ^{[visualcapitalist]}. There, Springfield and Columbus lead with five each. All of these are correct answers to different questions. The one that matches 'how many cities are called X' is the incorporated count, and that answer is Franklin.

How many Springfields are there in the US?

Sixteen incorporated ones, in 16 states: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee. Add the six CDPs in Arkansas, New Jersey, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin and the Census has 22 Springfields in 22 states. New York's Springfield Center is a separate name and is not counted.

The USGS file lists 66 populated places named exactly Springfield in the 50 states and DC. Wikipedia says the USGS counts 93 ^{[wikipedia-springfield]}. We did not recompute that figure and cannot say which USGS extract it came from. Whatever the count, Springfield is not the most common name on any of the three measures. It ranks 14th among incorporated places, 7th among all Census places, and outside the GNIS top 20.

City names shared with presidents and founders

Franklin, Madison and Clinton top the national list, and all three are surnames of famous Americans. Benjamin Franklin never held the presidency, and many Clintons honour DeWitt Clinton, the New York governor who built the Erie Canal, rather than the president. The table lists the counts; it does not claim that every Jackson is named for Andrew Jackson.

Washington, often called the most common city name, has 15 incorporated places. The capital is not one of them: the Census records Washington, DC as a nonfunctioning legal entity, because the District government runs it. Lincoln is more common as a CDP than as a city, with 17 Census places but only 10 incorporated.

Which states reuse the same names most

The common names cluster where there are many small incorporated towns: the Midwest and the South. Illinois has an incorporated place for 18 of the top 20 names, Ohio for 17 and North Carolina for 16. The pattern says as much about how states organise local government as about taste. Hawaii has no incorporated places below the county, so it scores zero. Connecticut and Rhode Island govern through towns the Census lists as county subdivisions, not places, so their famous Franklins and Clintons do not appear here.

How American town names are built

Three quarters of incorporated place names are a single word. The ending -ville closes 1,321 of them and -ton 1,147, so between them they finish one incorporated place name in eight. Some endings are more common among CDPs than among incorporated places: -wood, Hills, Park and Heights name subdivisions, and subdivisions are what many CDPs are.

What the counts say about test data

Of the 12,662 distinct incorporated-place names, 9,936 are used exactly once. So a US address with a made-up city name is easy to spot, and a fixture that uses only Springfield and Franklin is just as unrealistic in the other direction. Realistic test data draws real cities with their real distribution, and pairs each with a ZIP code that belongs to it.

• City and state must agree. Twenty-six places are called Franklin, so a city name alone does not identify a place. A form that keys on city without state will merge records from different states.
• Descriptors are not part of the name. The Census writes 'Franklin city' and 'Franklin village'; USPS and every form expect Franklin. Strip the legal form before matching, as the script does.
• Punctuation varies. St. Paul and Saint Paul, Mount Vernon and Mt. Vernon are the same places under two spellings. Test both in any city field, alongside the name validation cases for the person fields.

Download the data

Five files hold everything on this page. The main CSV ranks the 300 most common incorporated-place names with all three counts and the number of states. The GNIS CSV ranks the 100 most common populated-place names in the USGS file. The state CSV lists each state's totals and its most repeated names, the patterns CSV has the endings and openings, and the summary holds the totals and the Springfield rows. The files are CC BY 4.0, so reuse them with a link back; the Census and USGS files underneath are public domain.

Method note: the counting script downloads the 2025 Gazetteer places file and the GNIS populated-places file, about 7.5 MB in total. It removes each place's legal descriptor using the Census LSAD code list ^[lsad] and drops the word Town from the 13 Massachusetts cities written as 'Franklin Town city'. Incorporated means functional status A or B, an active government ^[funcstat]; 39 inactive or nonfunctioning places and 8 '(balance)' records are excluded. GNIS counts cover state codes 01 to 56, the 50 states and DC. For the street-level view of the same question, see the most common street names.