How do you assign FIPS codes to a list of addresses?

Question

I'm trying to add FIPS codes to a list of school addresses in the United States (over 6,000 so I can't just look them up). I have the address, zip codes, and latitude/longitude for each school. I did a spatial join to a US counties shapefile. My question is, is there a way to assign FIPS codes through a spatial join? The addresses are recognized when i do the spatial join but it just tells me how many schools are in each county not the FIPS codes for each school in each county.

Or is there an easier way to get FIPS codes assigned for each of the schools that I have?

Thanks in advance!

JoeBorgione · Answer

I assume you created a point feature class of the schools by adding the xy values to an arcmap session. Right?  Then you performed the spatial join with the counties feature class.  I also have to assume that your counties feature class has the fips code in the attribute table.  From the on line help for spatial join: By default, all attributes of the join features are appended to attributes of the target features and copied over to the output feature class. You can define which of the attributes will be written to the output by manipulating them in the Field Map of Join Features parameter.

Spatial Join is the way to do what you want to do.  You need to specify how the join is performed and what attributes will be carried over.  You are performing a point in polygon geo-process.  It's bread and butter to what we do.

There are more than a few post posts regarding spatial join, easily found with a search.

Hope this helps-