Municipalities of the Marshall Islands

Note: the Republic of the Marshall Islands is so small that I have listed it as having only one primary division, consisting of the entire country. The table on this page shows municipalities, which I classify as secondary divisions.

International standard ISO 3166-2 was published on December 15, 1998. It superseded ISO/DIS 3166-2 (draft international standard), which came out in fall 1996. The draft standard shows no administrative subdivisions of the Marshall Islands. The final standard shows 24 municipalities. They appear to be a subset of the 33 municipalities recognized by FIPS PUB 6-4. It also shows two chains of islands, which are a higher level of subdivision than the municipalities (i.e., each chain includes numerous municipalities).

The change is inconsistent with ISO's usual practice. About twenty small island nations had subdivisions that were listed in the draft standard, but were dropped from the final standard as being "not relevant". The Marshall Islands is even smaller than many of those twenty.

The table below shows all of the municipalities listed by FIPS, with ISO codes where they exist.

FIPS PUB 6-4 divides the Marshall Islands into municipalities. It assigns a three-digit code to each of them. When the FIPS 5-2 and 6-4 codes are concatenated, as in 68140 for Kili, the result is a code that uniquely identifies a county-equivalent unit in the United States.

Other names of subdivisions:

This page  has an unusually thorough list of alternate names for the atolls. In a few cases, the names in the table above are missing, but the identification should be straightforward. It also gives the latitudes and longitudes of the islands.

Population history:

From 1946 to 1980, the population of Enewetak was evacuated to Ujelang because of nuclear testing. A similar, but more complex, evacuation removed the people of Bikini to Kili. In the 1973 census, 19 people were included in the total but did not state their municipality. Municipalities are not listed here if they had zero population during the entire period.

Source: 1998-99 Yearbook  of the Marshall Islands.

Other names of subdivisions:

Enewetak: Eniwetok (variant)