Warwickshire County Council is the county council that governs the non-metropolitan county of Warwickshire in England. Its headquarters are at Shire Hall in the centre of Warwick, the county town. The council's principal functions are county roads and rights of way, social services, education and libraries, but it also provides numerous other local government services in its area.

Elected county councils were created in 1889 under the Local Government Act 1888, taking over many administrative functions which had previously been performed by unelected magistrates at the quarter sessions. The cities of Birmingham and Coventry were considered large enough to provide their own county-level services and so were made county boroughs, independent from Warwickshire County Council.^{[lower-alpha 1]} The county council was elected by and provided services to the rest of the county, which area was termed the administrative county. The 1888 Act also said that any urban sanitary districts which straddled county boundaries were to be placed entirely in the county which had the majority of that district's population, which saw Warwickshire cede its part of Tamworth to Staffordshire and its part of Hinckley to Leicestershire.^[3]

The first elections to the county council were held in January 1889 and it formally came into being on 1 April 1889. On that day it held its first official meeting at the Shire Hall in Warwick, the courthouse which had served as the meeting place for the quarter sessions which preceded the county council. John Dugdale, the Conservative MP for Nuneaton, was appointed the first chairman of the council.^[4]

The administrative county ceded Aston Manor and Erdington to Birmingham in 1911.^[5] Solihull was made a county borough in 1964.^[6]

The administrative county was reformed in 1974 to become a non-metropolitan county, at which point it also ceded Sutton Coldfield, Hockley Heath and much of the Meriden Rural District to the new West Midlands metropolitan county, which also covered the already independent county boroughs of Birmingham, Coventry and Solihull, alongside other territory from Staffordshire and Worcestershire.^[7][8] At the same time, Warwickshire was divided into five non-metropolitan districts which form a lower tier of local government.^[9]

Warwickshire County Council provides county-level services. District-level services are provided by the five district councils:

• North Warwickshire Borough Council
• Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council
• Rugby Borough Council
• Stratford-on-Avon District Council
• Warwick District Council

Much of the county is also covered by civil parishes, which form a third tier of local government.^[10]

Since the last boundary changes in 2017 the council has been divided into 57 electoral divisions, each electing one councillor. Elections are held every four years.^[19]

The county council is based at the Shire Hall in Market Place, Warwick, a complex of buildings built over many years. The oldest part was a courthouse built in 1758 facing Northgate Street.^[20] As the county council's functions grew it built new offices in 1929–32 on the adjoining site of the former county jail, retaining the jail's 1783 façade to Northgate Street. A large extension completed in 1958 included a new council chamber, and a further extension in 1966 created a new frontage and main entrance for the building facing Market Place.^[21]