How Many Lakes Does Minnesota Have? The Real Count Behind 10,000

Minnesota has 11,842 lakes, if you count the way the Minnesota DNR does: basins of 10 acres or more. The famous 10,000 on the license plate is a slogan that undersells the real figure by nearly two thousand. The count, the list of lakeless counties and the common names below come from the DNR's lakes, rivers and wetlands facts page, checked in October 2026.

Where 11,842 comes from

The number is a tally of lake basins at least 10 acres in size. Ten acres is roughly seven and a half football fields, so plenty of water you would call a pond falls below the line. Minnesota does not publish an official count of everything smaller, but there are many thousands of those little basins scattered through the forest and prairie.

Three things are worth knowing about the count.

• It is a size rule, not a legal definition. In its lake FAQ, the DNR says a lake is not defined by size or depth. It describes a lake as an enclosed basin holding water, generally open and deep enough to have a wave-swept shore. The 10-acre cutoff is simply the yardstick used for the statewide tally.
• It includes basins that do not look like lakes every year. Shallow prairie basins can be open water in a wet decade and cattail marsh in a dry one.
• It is not the number of lakes you can fish. A 2016 DNR fisheries document says the agency manages about 4,285 lakes and rivers for fishing. Many of the rest are shallow, landlocked or without public access. The state's LakeFinder is the place to see which ones have surveys, maps and accesses.

The slogan

"Land of 10,000 Lakes" is marketing, and old marketing at that. The phrase is usually traced to tourism promotion in the 1910s, when a group of Minnesota communities pooled money to advertise the state to motorists, and it has been stamped on Minnesota license plates since 1950. Nobody in that era had a precise inventory. The round number stuck because it was easy to say, and because it was, if anything, modest.

How much water that is

Lakes are only part of the picture. The DNR's figures:

Measure	Figure
Lakes of 10 acres or more	11,842
Natural rivers and streams	6,564, totaling about 69,200 miles
Area of lakes and rivers (deep water)	2,560,299 acres
Total surface water including wetlands	13,136,357 acres
Mississippi River within Minnesota	680 miles
Longest lake shoreline	Lake Vermilion, 290 miles

A DNR education fact sheet puts it another way: about one acre of water for every 20 acres of land.

The shoreline claim

You will hear that Minnesota has more shoreline than California, Florida and Hawaii combined. The DNR itself makes that statement in its MinnAqua education materials. It holds up because of how crooked lake and river edges are: one lake like Vermilion, with its islands and bays, adds 290 miles on its own. Be a little cautious with any specific mileage you see quoted, though. Shoreline length depends heavily on the scale of the map used to measure it, and ocean coastline figures for other states vary just as much with the method.

Counties with the most lakes, and none

Lakes are not spread evenly. They follow the glaciers, which is the subject of a separate guide on why Minnesota has so many lakes.

Most lakes. Otter Tail County is the usual answer. The county counts 1,048 lakes, more than any other county in Minnesota. The rest of the top tier is what you would guess from a road map: Cass, Itasca, St. Louis, Crow Wing, Lake, Cook, Becker, Hubbard and Aitkin counties are all thick with water. County totals depend on the same size cutoff and on how lakes that straddle a county line are assigned, so treat any ranking past first place as approximate.

No natural lakes. The DNR lists four: Mower and Olmsted in the southeast, Pipestone and Rock in the far southwest. The southeast escaped the last glaciers, and its landscape is stream valleys and limestone bluffs rather than basins. The southwest corner drains well and sits on older, more eroded ground. People in those counties still swim and fish locally, but they do it in reservoirs. Split Rock Lake in Pipestone County, the centerpiece of Split Rock Creek State Park, is a dammed creek. Rochester's lakes in Olmsted County are flood-control reservoirs.

You can browse lakes by county from the counties page.

The same names, over and over

With nearly 12,000 lakes to name, settlers and surveyors ran out of ideas early. The DNR's ten most common lake names, in order:

1. Mud
2. Long
3. Rice
4. Bass
5. Round
6. Horseshoe
7. Twin
8. Island
9. Johnson
10. Spring

The names describe what people saw (a long lake, a round one, a muddy one), what grew there (wild rice), or who homesteaded next door. The practical consequence is real: there are Long Lakes and Mud Lakes in dozens of counties. When you look up a fishing report, a boat access or an ice-out date, search by lake name plus county or nearest town. The DNR also assigns every basin a unique identification number, which is what LakeFinder and this site use behind the scenes to keep the Long Lakes straight.

Some names have changed. Bde Maka Ska in Minneapolis, formerly Lake Calhoun, is the best-known recent example of a Dakota name being restored. Under state law, a naming request starts with a petition to the county board and ends with DNR and federal approval.

How Minnesota compares

Alaska has more lakes than every other state, by a wide margin. The friendly argument is with Wisconsin, which publishes a higher number than Minnesota's. The catch is the cutoff: Wisconsin's count takes in very small water bodies, including many under 10 acres, while Minnesota's stops at 10. The two totals cannot be compared directly, and neither state is wrong. They are answering different questions.

The better way to think about it is water you can use. Minnesota has thousands of lakes with a public access, a DNR fisheries survey and a map. That is the number that matters on a Saturday morning, and you can start with the lake search, the map or the list of lakes near you.

Bottom line

• The official count is 11,842 lakes of 10 acres or more. The slogan rounds down.
• Four counties have no natural lakes, and Otter Tail County has the most.
• So many names repeat that you should always include the county when you look a lake up.