The History of FIPS Standards in US Government Data
FIPS geographic codes have been used by the US government for over 50 years. Here's the history of how these standards developed and why they still matter today.
Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) have a longer history than most data professionals realize. The program was established in the 1960s by the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) to create interoperability standards for the rapidly expanding federal computer infrastructure. FIPS 5 (state codes) was first published in 1970; FIPS 6 (county codes) in 1970 as well. For over 50 years, these two standards have been the backbone of US geographic data interoperability.
In 2008, FIPS 5 and FIPS 6 were officially withdrawn as FIPS standards — but the codes themselves didn't disappear. NIST transferred maintenance of the geographic codes to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), where they became ANSI INCITS 38 (state codes) and ANSI INCITS 31 (county codes). The Census Bureau continues to maintain and publish these codes, and every federal agency continues to use them. The practical effect of "withdrawal" was zero — every dataset that used FIPS codes before 2008 still uses the same codes today.
The broader FIPS program covered hundreds of standards — not just geography but also character encodings, programming languages, and security protocols. Many FIPS standards were superseded by commercial standards (FIPS 46, the Data Encryption Standard, was replaced by AES in 2005). The geographic codes are among the longest-lived FIPS standards, and their survival reflects the enormous switching costs involved in changing geographic identifiers across thousands of federal datasets.
Today, "FIPS codes" is the universal shorthand even though the formal ANSI designation would be more accurate. The codes are effectively permanent infrastructure — changing them would require coordinated updates across every federal agency, every state government that uses federal data, and every researcher, company, and nonprofit that has built systems around them. Our FIPS explainer situates them in the current data landscape, and the state and county references provide the current authoritative lists.
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