Counties of Norway
administrative regions that form the primary first-level subdivisions of Norway
The 15 counties of Norway are the first-level administrative divisions of Norway. The counties are further subdivided into 357 municipalities (Norwegian: kommune). The island territories of Svalbard and Jan Mayen are outside the county divisions and they are ruled directly from the national level. The capital city of Oslo is both a county and a municipality.
In 2017, the Solberg government decided to abolish some of the counties and to merge them with other counties to form larger ones, reducing the number of counties from 19 to 11, which was implemented on 1 January 2020. This sparked popular opposition, with some calling for the reform to be reversed. The Storting voted to partly undo the reform on 14 June 2022, with Norway to have 15 counties from 1 January 2024. Three of the newly merged counties, namely Vestfold og Telemark, Viken and Troms og Finnmark, were dissolved and the old counties existing before the reform re-established with a few minor changes as some municipalities merged across former county borders and some switched counties during the 2020 local government reform (Regionreformen i Norge).
Name
The counties in Norway are called fylke (singular) and fylker (plural). This name comes from the Old Norse word fylki which means "district" or "county", but it is similar to the same root as "folk".
“Counties of Norway” enters the record as administrative regions that form the primary first-level subdivisions of Norway. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Counties, Norway and administrative can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q192299. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2017, 2020, 2022 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Counties of Norway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.