Albania Map with Counties

Albania has 12 counties, known as qarqe: Berat, Dibër, Durrës, Elbasan, Fier, Gjirokastër, Korçë, Kukës, Lezhë, Shkodër, Tirana and Vlorë. They make up the first level of administration and have held their current shape since the 2000 reorganization, which replaced the earlier prefecture and district arrangement. Below the counties there are 61 municipalities, so a county map covers only the top tier of Albanian local government. The Ultimaps map on this page draws all 12 units, matching the official count used in national statistics and in NUTS-style regional references.

Korçë is the largest of Albania's 12 counties by land area, at 3,711 km² (1,433 sq mi) per 2023 figures. It lies in the southeast, along the borders with Greece and North Macedonia, and is administered from the city of Korçë. For scale, Korçë has roughly 4.8 times the land area of Durrës, the smallest county at 766 km² (296 sq mi) (2023). Size and population rank do not match in Albania: Tirana, the most populous county with 758,513 residents (2023 census), ranks only 10th of the 12 counties in land area, at 1,652 km² (638 sq mi).

Tirana County is Albania's most populous, with 758,513 residents recorded in the 2023 census. It contains Tirana, the national capital and the country's largest city, which makes the county the main political and economic center. The spread between counties is wide. Tirana holds about 12.6 times the population of Gjirokastër County, which counted 60,013 residents in 2023, and about 12.2 times that of Kukës County at 61,998 (2023). In area Tirana ranks well behind Korçë, the biggest county at 3,711 km² (1,433 sq mi) (2023).

Gjirokastër County has the smallest population of Albania's 12 counties, with 60,013 residents at the 2023 census. Kukës County comes next at 61,998 (2023), so Gjirokastër and Kukës have the two smallest county populations. Gjirokastër's seat is the city of Gjirokastër, a UNESCO-listed historic town near the Greek border. Tirana County recorded 758,513 people in the same census, roughly 12.6 times Gjirokastër's total. That range is why population maps of Albania usually work better with a graduated color scale than with flat categories.

Dibër County is the one Albanian county whose name does not match a city inside it. Its administrative center is Peshkopi, a town in the northeast, while Dibër refers to the wider historic region the county is named after. The other 11 counties are all named after their seats, so Shkodër County is run from Shkodër, Vlorë County from Vlorë, and so on. This single mismatch is the usual source of labeling errors on Albanian county maps, because there is no town called Dibër acting as the seat. The current county names date from the 2000 reorganization.

Albania's counties, or qarqe, are the current first-level units, 12 of them since the 2000 reorganization. Districts, or rrethe, belong to the older system that the reform set aside, and they were smaller and far more numerous. Plenty of printed atlases, school maps and GIS files still circulate with district boundaries, which is why two maps of the same country can look nothing alike. If the map you are comparing shows dozens of units instead of 12, it is a district map. Beneath today's counties sit 61 municipalities, the tier that handles most day-to-day local administration.

Albania's coast runs along the Adriatic Sea in the north and center and the Ionian Sea in the south. The counties with a coastline are Shkodër, Lezhë, Durrës, Tirana, Fier and Vlorë; Tirana County meets the Adriatic along its western Kavajë section. Durrës holds the country's principal port and is also the smallest county by area at 766 km² (296 sq mi) (2023). Lezhë County includes the seaside town of Shëngjin, and Vlorë County covers the point where the Adriatic meets the Ionian. The other six counties — Dibër, Kukës, Korçë, Elbasan, Berat and Gjirokastër — are inland.

Albania's 12 counties took their present form in 2000, when the country reorganized its first-level divisions and dropped the earlier prefecture and district structure. The framework has been stable ever since, while the lower tier was later consolidated into 61 municipalities. Albania itself borders Montenegro, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Greece, with Adriatic and Ionian coastlines on the west, and the whole country keeps Central European Time (UTC+1), shifting to Central European Summer Time (UTC+2) in summer. Because the county map has not been redrawn since 2000, datasets published at any point after that year still line up with it.

Custom maps of Albania are built inside Ultimaps in an ordinary browser tab, with nothing to install and no account to open. There are two ways to color the counties: click a single county such as Fier or Lezhë and pick its fill by hand, or bring in a table with one number per county so a graduated scale runs across all 12. You can swap the palette, change the background, reword any label and thin or thicken the county borders before exporting. Markers with captions can sit on Tirana, Vlorë, Peshkopi or any coordinate pair you type. Export the result as PNG, PDF or SVG.