Number of Libraries in the United States as of September 2020

A Seventh Update to ALA Library Fact Sheet 1

See the Sixth Update, Fifth Update, the Fourth Update, the Third Update, the Second Update, and the First Update.

There are an estimated 123,867 libraries of all kinds in the United States today!

Albina Library, a branch of the Multnomah County Library, in Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon (4 November 2012) by Finetooth / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) via Wikimedia Commons

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No single annual survey provides statistics on all types of libraries. Figures for public, academic, and school libraries come from surveys by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), while the figures for the other libraries come from Information Today’s American Library Directory.

In a press release dated July 16, 2020, People Visited Public Libraries More Than a Billion Times in One Year, IMLS announced the Fiscal Year 2017 data was available, including the Supplementary Tables PDF. The Public Libraries in the United States, Fiscal Year 2017: Volume I (June 2020) (PDF) continued the slight decline of the last few years in the number of public libraries overall, from 9,057 administrative entities in the October 2017 update to 9,045.

The numbers for academic and school libraries come from the NCES Library Statistics Program, the Private School Universe Survey (PSS), the…