City Types

Reference for the 35 distinct values of the cities.type field, their meanings, and how to filter down to genuine settlements

Every city record carries an optional type field describing what kind of place it is. The value is inherited from the upstream GeoNames feature classification.

The type field mixes two ideas — what a place is (city, town, village) and what administrative role it fills (adm2, county, parish). The same place can be tagged either way. For example, Dallas is adm2 because it is the seat of Dallas County, and major Australian cities are adm1 because they are seats of state-level governments.

All Type Values

There are 35 distinct values across 153,765 city rows.

type	Count	Settlement?	Meaning
city	96,098	✅	Actual city
adm2	20,796	✅	2nd-order admin division — usually a real city that is also a county/district seat
adm3	15,774	✅	Mostly real municipalities/communes tagged with their admin role
section	5,346	✅	Suburbs and districts of larger cities
county	4,409	❌	County-level admin unit — not a settlement
adm4	3,909	✅	Similar mix to adm3
adm1	3,505	✅	1st-order admin division — usually a state/region seat (e.g. major Australian cities)
district	2,381	✅	District-level populated place
(null)	1,900	⚠️	No type assigned — see below
regency	390	❌	Indonesian kabupaten — admin division
prefecture	369	❌	Prefecture-level admin division
locality	319	✅	Named populated place
capital	281	✅	National or regional capital
municipality	209	✅	Municipality
parish	80	❌	Louisiana-style parish (= county)
banner	52	❌	Inner Mongolia banner — admin division
town	48	✅	Town
province	36	❌	Province-level admin division
adm5	16	✅	5th-order admin division (populated)
abandoned	15	❌	Abandoned place
cities	13	✅	Data artifact of city
area	12	❌	Generic administrative area
village	10	✅	Village
historical	9	❌	Historical place — not a live settlement
settlement	9	✅	Settlement
oblast	8	❌	Oblast — admin division
gov_seat	6	✅	Government seat (populated)
special municipality	6	✅	Special municipality
administrative zone	5	❌	Administrative zone
region	4	❌	Region-level admin division
destroyed	3	❌	Destroyed place
township	3	✅	Township
religious	2	❌	Religious site — not a settlement
subdistrict	1	✅	Subdistrict (populated)
historical_capital	1	❌	Former capital — not a live settlement

Filtering to Genuine Settlements

For use cases like “find the nearest city to a location” or “populate a dropdown”, you want to exclude admin-only and non-place types. Use an exclusion list rather than an inclusion list — any new settlement-style value added in the future is kept by default.

Exclude these types:

county, regency, prefecture, parish, banner, province, area, oblast,
administrative zone, region, abandoned, historical, destroyed, religious,
historical_capital

SQL

SELECT *
FROM cities
WHERE (
  type IS NULL
  OR type NOT IN (
    'county', 'regency', 'prefecture', 'parish', 'banner', 'province',
    'area', 'oblast', 'administrative zone', 'region',
    'abandoned', 'historical', 'destroyed', 'religious', 'historical_capital'
  )
)
AND latitude IS NOT NULL
AND longitude IS NOT NULL;

type NOT IN (...) evaluates to UNKNOWN for rows where type is NULL, silently dropping them. The explicit type IS NULL OR ... keeps null-type rows. Remove the type IS NULL clause only if you want to exclude them.

JavaScript

const EXCLUDED_TYPES = new Set([
  'county', 'regency', 'prefecture', 'parish', 'banner', 'province',
  'area', 'oblast', 'administrative zone', 'region',
  'abandoned', 'historical', 'destroyed', 'religious', 'historical_capital',
]);

const settlements = cities.filter(
  (c) => !EXCLUDED_TYPES.has(c.type) && c.latitude != null && c.longitude != null
);

Python

EXCLUDED_TYPES = {
  'county', 'regency', 'prefecture', 'parish', 'banner', 'province',
  'area', 'oblast', 'administrative zone', 'region',
  'abandoned', 'historical', 'destroyed', 'religious', 'historical_capital',
}

settlements = [
  c for c in cities
  if c.get('type') not in EXCLUDED_TYPES
  and c.get('latitude') is not None
  and c.get('longitude') is not None
]

Records with No Type

About 1,900 rows have a null type. They are a mix of legitimate places and unclassified entries. For strict settlement queries, the safest signal is the presence of valid coordinates (latitude/longitude not null), and — where available — a non-null population.

Related

Database Schema

Full cities table definition including the type field.

Multi-Level Territories

How overseas territories and dual-modeled entities affect city queries.