Citizenship Test Practice Official USCIS civics questions

Citizenship Test Answers for Iowa

Four of the 128 civics questions depend on where you live. Here is how to answer them if you live in Iowa.

62. What is the capital of your state?

Answer for Iowa

Des Moines

This is the one state-specific answer that does not change. The three below change with elections. Every name on this page is checked each night against the congressional record and, for governors, two independent public records, and a name is left out rather than printed when the sources disagree.

23. Who is one of your state's U.S. senators now?

Answer for Iowa now

  • Chuck Grassley
  • Joni Ernst

You only need to give one of these names.

Iowa has two U.S. senators, like every state. You only need to name one of them. Senators are elected to six-year terms, so this answer changes; give the name of a senator serving on the day of your interview.

Look up Iowa's senators at senate.gov

29. Name your U.S. representative.

Your representative depends on your congressional district, not just your state, so it is different for two people living in the same city. Look it up by ZIP code.

All 4 of Iowa's representatives, by district
DistrictRepresentative
1Mariannette Miller-Meeks
2Ashley Hinson
3Zachary Nunn
4Randy Feenstra

If you do not know your district, the lookup below finds it from your ZIP code.

Find your representative at house.gov

Residents of territories with nonvoting Delegates or Resident Commissioners may provide the name of that Delegate or Commissioner. Also acceptable is any statement that the territory has no (voting) representatives in Congress.

61. Who is the governor of your state now?

Answer for Iowa now

Kim Reynolds

Governors are elected and change, so answer with whoever is serving on the day of your interview. Your state government's official .gov website is the reliable place to check.

Background on Iowa

Des Moines is Iowa's capital and its largest city, taking the seat from Iowa City in 1857 because the legislature wanted a location nearer the center of the state as settlement moved west. Iowa entered the Union in 1846 as the 29th state. It has 4 congressional districts and 6 electoral votes. For decades Iowa held the first presidential caucuses in the country, which gave a small state outsized attention every four years and illustrates a point the test makes elsewhere: the Electoral College counts by state, so campaigns treat individual states, not the national vote total, as the thing to win. The capital is the one answer here that will not change.

This background section is written by US Citizenship Test Practice. It is not part of the USCIS question list, and it names no senator, representative or governor itself: those names change with elections, so they appear only in the answers above, which are checked every night.

The other 124 questions

Everything else on the civics test is the same no matter where you live.