THE OCEAN COUNTY LAND BRIEF
Land in the
Pine Barrens setting.
Ocean County has 628.3 square miles of land in New Jersey. 3 mapped landscape regions meet across Ocean County: Pine Barrens, Barrier Islands/Coastal Marshes, Inner Coastal Plain.
Sandy coastal landscapes combine beaches, dunes, bays and marshes with oak-pine woodland. These pine-barrens settings form a transition between warmer southern coasts and rockier shores farther north.
Regional context: Atlantic Coastal Pine Barrens ↗ · Regional mapping across the county footprint
Where the landscape changes
Ocean County intersects 3 mapped regional units. The largest mapped shares are:
- Pine Barrens84.1%
- Barrier Islands/Coastal Marshes14%
- Inner Coastal Plain1.9%
Finding your parcel within Ocean County
The atlas lists 60 cities, towns, townships, and Census communities associated with Ocean County, including Jackson, Lacey, Manchester. The list includes overlapping geography types and does not divide the county into exclusive service areas.
Ocean County by land and water
The Census records 286.5 square miles of water within Ocean County, or 31.3% of its total area. That share is close to Ocean County’s 31.3%. This is geographic context; waterfront status and usable land must be checked at the parcel.
For scale, Ocean County has 7.5 times the land area of nearby Lacey township (83.2 square miles). These areas describe boundaries, not comparable property prices.
The Census boundary meets Atlantic County, Burlington County, Monmouth County within New Jersey. A tract near one of these lines should be matched to the county identifier on its own records.