THE RICE COUNTY LAND BRIEF
Land in the
Great Bend Sand Prairie setting.
Rice County has 726.2 square miles of land in Kansas. 3 mapped landscape regions meet across Rice County: Great Bend Sand Prairie, Rolling Plains and Breaks, Smoky Hills.
These plains are lower and somewhat more irregular than the High Plains to the west. Their grassland setting includes rolling terrain and a transition toward greater rainfall in the east.
Regional context: Central Great Plains ↗ · Regional mapping across the county footprint
Where the landscape changes
Rice County intersects 3 mapped regional units. The largest mapped shares are:
- Great Bend Sand Prairie44.5%
- Rolling Plains and Breaks30.8%
- Smoky Hills24.6%
Finding your parcel within Rice County
The atlas lists 29 cities, towns, townships, and Census communities associated with Rice County, including Sterling, Center, Eureka. The list includes overlapping geography types and does not divide the county into exclusive service areas.
Rice County by land and water
The Census records 1.73 square miles of water within Rice County, or 0.2% of its total area. That share is close to Rice County’s 0.2%. This is geographic context; waterfront status and usable land must be checked at the parcel.
For scale, Rice County has 273.6 times the land area of nearby Lyons city (2.65 square miles). These areas describe boundaries, not comparable property prices.
The Census boundary meets Barton County, Ellsworth County, McPherson County, Reno County, Stafford County within Kansas. A tract near one of these lines should be matched to the county identifier on its own records.