List of Pennsylvania municipalities and counties with home rule charters, optional charters, or optional plans

This is a list of Pennsylvania municipalities and counties with home rule charters, optional charters, or optional plans, including municipalities with home rule charters, optional charters, or optional plans.

Home rule municipalities

Most municipalities in Pennsylvania must follow state law except where the state has expressly given jurisdiction to the municipality, and are therefore subject to the Third-Class City Code (all first-class, second-class, and second-class A cities, of which there is one each, are home rule municipalities), the Borough Code (which governs boroughs and the one incorporated town in the state, Bloomsburg), the First-Class Township Code, or the Second-Class Township Code. Home rule municipalities in Pennsylvania, of which there are 71, enjoy the opposite situation (i.e., they may govern themselves except where expressly forbidden by state law), and are governed according to their unique home rule charter rather than one of the above codes. While most home rule charter municipalities continue to reference their previous forms of government in their corporate names, they may also adopt a new corporate name that references a different form of government, or that omits the form from the name altogether.

Counties with home rule charters

Counties with a home rule charter, of which there are 7, may design their own form of county government, but are still generally subject to the County Code (which covers first-, third-, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-class counties) or the Second-Class County Code (which covers second-class and second-class A counties). Because home rule charters primarily function to change the form of local government, and do not significantly change the relationship between a county and the state, as they do with municipalities, counties with home rule charters are still generally considered counties under state law.

Philadelphia County is unique in Pennsylvania in that it is a consolidated city-county, and so while the county is technically not governed by a home rule charter (and is therefore not included on the list), the fact that Philadelphia City (which constitutes the same land area as and administers all the governmental affairs of Philadelphia County) is a home rule municipality means that in practice the county is as well.

Optional charter and optional plan municipalities

In addition to home rule charters, two other forms of non-standard government exist in Pennsylvania: optional plans and optional charters. Optional charters are older (dating from 1957 rather than 1972), and were originally available only to third-class cities; it is no longer possible to apply for an optional charter (since 1972), but those cities which already had them and which did not adopt home rule charters, of which there are 11, retain them. Optional plans may be adopted by any municipality, and function essentially the same as optional charters (except that they have been generalized to accommodate other municipalities). They both allow the municipality to adopt a form of government that differs from the type proscribed by the municipal code that municipality is subject to, but do not change the municipality's relationship with the state government. Therefore, they are still considered boroughs (of which there are 2), third-class cities (of which there are 3), or townships of the first- (of which there is 1) or second-class (of there are 5), respectively, under state law.

See also

• List of municipalities in Pennsylvania
• List of cities in Pennsylvania
• List of counties in Pennsylvania
• List of towns and boroughs in Pennsylvania
• List of townships in Pennsylvania