Alaska cities and towns

This directory lists every place the US Census Bureau tabulates in Alaska, ranked from the largest to the smallest by population. Incorporated cities, towns and villages appear alongside census-designated places (CDPs) — unincorporated communities that have no local government of their own but are counted separately because they have a recognised name and settled population. The suffix in each name ("city", "town", "village", "CDP") is the Census legal/statistical description, which is why you will see entries such as "Anchorage municipality".

The largest place in Alaska is Anchorage municipality with 289,069 residents, and the 355 places on this page hold 718,025 people between them. Median household income across the listed places runs from $13,750 to $211,071, and median home values range from $9,999 to $604,200 — a spread that shows how much local housing markets diverge inside a single state.

Every figure comes from the American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year five-year estimates, which average survey responses over sixty months. That averaging is what makes small towns measurable at all, but it also means the numbers describe the period as a whole rather than today. Blank cells are estimates the Census suppressed because the local sample was too small to publish reliably. Select any place to open its full profile with affordability ratios, poverty and homeownership rates, and links to nearby communities of similar size.

Alaska is a one-centre state: Anchorage municipality alone holds 40% of everyone on this page, and the runner-up, Fairbanks city, is only 32,242 people. Rankings here mostly measure distance from that single core. These are mostly very small areas — the median place counts 214 residents. Rankings at the bottom of this list are within each other's margin of error, so treat close positions as ties.

Buying is a little easier here than nationally: Alaska's median place shows $194,600 in home value on $63,889 of income, a ratio of 3 against 3.9 across the country. Median gross rent runs $1,025 including utilities, or about 19% of median household income annually.

Incomes fan out sharply inside Alaska. Strip the outliers and the top-decile place still earns 2.79× the bottom-decile one ($101,250 against $36,250); include them and Pleasant Valley CDP tops the list at $211,071 and Healy Lake CDP anchors the bottom at $13,750. A single "Alaska average" is averaging across two different economies.

Read the blanks carefully: 93 of 355 rows (26%) have at least one estimate the Census withheld because the local sample was too thin to publish reliably. In a state with 280 places under a thousand residents, that is expected, not an error on this page.

How many places does Alaska have? 355 appear in the current federal tabulation, counting incorporated cities, towns and villages together with census-designated places — unincorporated communities with no local government of their own. 79% of them have fewer than a thousand residents, so the list is far longer than the number of towns you would recognise by name.

Which Alaska row should I compare mine against? Not the state median — it is pulled by the Alaska core. Compare against places in the same population band, which for most of this list means the entries below the top ten.

How current is this? Every figure comes from the American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year release published by the US Census Bureau, ACS 2019-2023 5-year estimates. It reflects the full survey window rather than a single date, and it is the most recent vintage available for places this small.