How many stars are on the current U.S. flag?
Guess before you scroll — the answer is below
The answer
50 stars
The current flag has 50 stars, one for every state, arranged in nine offset rows. It has flown unchanged since Hawaii became the 50th state in 1959 — the longest any version of the flag has gone without a redesign, since new states used to join far more often in the 1800s.
How to get close to this number
The flag encodes the answer: one star per state. If you know how many states there are, you know the star count, and the stripes encode the founding colonies from this site's companion question. A national flag that carries two different counts is unusual and makes both retrievable.
The stability is the interesting part: unchanged since 1959, which is the longest any version has lasted. Through the nineteenth century new states joined frequently and the flag was redesigned repeatedly; the design has now been fixed for longer than most people have been alive because the territorial expansion stopped.
That makes the flag a dated object rather than a timeless one. Each historical version corresponds to a specific range of years, and a flag with a given star count can be dated to within a few years — which is why star counts appear in provenance analysis for historical artefacts and photographs.
Where this number comes from
| Source | U.S. Department of State |
|---|---|
| Figure refers to | 2023 |
| Last checked | |
| Unit | stars |
Numbers move. If this one has drifted from its source, let us know.
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