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Reference directory

A directory of regional commissions

“Regional commission” is not one organisation but a whole family of them, at two very different scales. At the top are the nine federal regional commissions and authorities. Beneath them sit hundreds of state and sub-state bodies — and in several states those bodies are, quite literally, named “Regional Commission.” This directory maps both tiers, with verified counts and links to the primary sources behind them.

Federal regional commissions and authorities

These are the best-documented regional commissions in the United States: standing federal–state partnerships created by statute, each covering a defined multi-state region. Six are active; three have been authorised in law but are not yet operating. Full detail is on each profile and on the federal commissions overview.

State bodies literally named “Regional Commission”

The federal commissions are not the only bodies to use the name. Several states run their own networks of multi-county planning and development organisations, and in a handful of them those organisations are officially titled “Regional Commission.” These are creatures of state law and local membership — entirely separate from the federal commissions, and from one another.

State systems, A–Z

Below the federal tier, nearly every state operates some network of regional councils, planning commissions, or development districts. The names differ from state to state — council of governments, area development district, regional planning commission, regional commission — but the work is broadly the same: multi-jurisdiction planning, grant administration, and technical help for local governments. The table lists the dominant system in each state we were able to verify, with its count and type.

This is a representative selection, not a complete census: it covers the states with a clean, single, verifiable statewide system. Some states — Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York among them — run several overlapping networks at once (transportation planning organisations, federally tied development districts, and state economic-development regions), so no single number fully describes them. Those are discussed on the state & local bodies page.

The national picture

Taken together, this sub-state layer is far larger than the federal one. The national membership bodies that represent these organisations put the totals in the hundreds:

These categories overlap heavily — a single organisation is often a council of governments, a metropolitan planning organisation, and a development district all at once — so the figures cannot simply be added together. They are best read as four different lenses on the same broad field of a few hundred to roughly a thousand distinct bodies. Counts are drawn from the national associations of regional councils and development organisations; see the resources page for links.