Civil township

Currently, there are 20 states with civil townships, including Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia (in certain areas).

Township officers frequently include justice of the peace, road commissioner, assessor, constable, in addition to surveyor.

In New England and New York, states are generally subdivided into towns and cities, which are municipalities that provide most local services.

With the exception of a few remote areas of New Hampshire and Vermont and about half of Maine, all of New England lies within the borders of an incorporated municipality.

In portions of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, county subdivisions that are not incorporated are occasionally called townships, or by other terms such as "gore", "grant", "location", or "purchase".

Finally, New York and Vermont also have villages, which are smaller communities lying within the boundaries of a town that provide additional government services not provided by their parent town, such as sewage, fire, law enforcement, garbage collection, public facilities, water and building code enforcement.

Townships were established based on convenient geographical boundaries and vary in size from six to fifty-two square miles (10–135 km2).

A New Jersey township is similar, in that it is a form of municipal government equal in status to a village, town, borough, or city, and provides similar services to a Pennsylvania township, and varies in size from one-tenth (Shrewsbury Twp.)

However, the U.S. census does list Arkansas population based on townships (sometimes referred to as "county subdivisions" or "minor civil divisions").

[7] North Carolina is no exception to that rule, but it does have townships as minor geographical subdivisions of counties, including both unincorporated territory and also land within the bounds of incorporated cities and towns (as well as the extraterritorial jurisdiction of municipalities).

Township names are still used quite extensively at the county government level in North Carolina as a way of determining and dividing up areas for administrative purposes; primarily for collecting county taxes, determining fire districts (e.g. Lebanon Township in Durham County gives its name to the Lebanon Volunteer Fire Department), for real estate purposes such as categorizing land deeds, land surveys and other real estate documents, and for voter registration purposes.

[11] In May 2024 the five metro townships, all located in Salt Lake County, were incorporated as a cities or towns as a result of Utah's House Bill 35.

Local government was introduced into Nova Scotia (which at the time also included the maritime provinces of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island) in 1749 in the form of townships controlled by a court of quarter sessions, a system that had characterized local government in Britain and Virginia.

This court had both administrative and judicial functions, and took over most responsibilities of local government, including the appointment of necessary officers.

However, the statute was disallowed by the King in 1761, and direct democracy was replaced in the townships that had adopted it by the quarter sessions.