List of lightships of the United States

The first US lightship was put in place off of Willoughby Spit in Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, in 1820.

[1] Lightships remained in service in the United States until March 29, 1985, when the last ship, the Nantucket I, was decommissioned.

These numbers are the primary means of identifying individual lightships across her various stations.

In 1938, the Lighthouse Service retroactively allocated letter codes to the unnumbered lightships based on their research of available records, although some ships may have been lost or misidentified.

[3] Even with the hull numbers, it is common to refer to a lightship by the name of the station it serves (or Relief, if it is a relief ship) and a few, such as the Nantucket I and Nantucket II have been given individual names.