How many governments are in the US?

Question

How many governments are in the US? Like we have one federal government and fifty state governments. How many county governments, city governments, and so on?

Answer 1

There are around 20,000 units of government in the US.  Besides the ones you mentioned, there are school districts, transportation districts, and other special districts.

Answer 2

I just got my property tax bill and it has taxes levied from the city, the county, the library board, the school district, the water district and the state.  I am aware that some states also have towns, townships and villages, such that one can live in the village of A, in the town of A, in the township of A, in the county of B, in the State of C, and each of them has some sort of governing authority.   In short, I couldn't guess.

Answer 3

That depends on what you consider part of the US.

We have one federal government, and 50 state governments.  If you want to count the mayor of Washington, D.C. as one, since Washington, D.C. is not considered part of any state, that would be number 52.

Then we have 4 territories (Puerto Rico, Phillippines, Guam, and I forget the last one but I believe its the US Virgin Islands).  Each of those have their own government, but I don't know if you want to count them as part of the US or not.  So that would bump us up to 56.

Add-on:

I should have read the whole question.  If you count each county and each city and so on, we go well into the thousands.  I have no idea how high, but its in the thousands.