Inter-county cricket matches have been played since the early 18th century, involving teams that are representative of the historic counties of England and Wales.

Two county championship competitions have existed since the late 19th century at different levels: the County Championship, a first-class competition which involves 18 clubs, of which 17 are English and one is from Wales; and the National Counties Championship, with 19 English clubs and one club representing several Welsh counties.

County clubs have also played limited-overs competitions since the 1960s. The first edition of the Gillette Cup in 1963 was the world's first List A cricket tournament. The Sunday League existed from 1969 to 2009, mostly as a 40-overs-per-side league. The 2003 Twenty20 Cup was the world's first Twenty20 tournament. Currently, the main limited-overs county competitions are the One-Day Cup, Women's One-Day Cup, T20 Blast and Women's T20 Blast.

County cricket started in the 18th century; the earliest known inter-county match was played in 1709, though an official County Championship was not instituted until 1890.

Inter-county cricket was popular throughout the 18th century, although the best teams, such as Kent in the 1740s and Hampshire in the days of the famous Hambledon Club, were usually acknowledged as such by being matched against All-England. The most successful county teams were Hampshire, Kent, Middlesex, Surrey and Sussex. There was, however, often a crossover between town and county, with some strong local clubs tending at times to represent a whole county. Examples are London, which often played against county teams and was in some respects almost a county club in itself; Slindon, which was for a few years in the 1740s effectively representative of Sussex as a county; Dartford, sometimes representative of Kent; and the Hambledon Club, certainly representative of Hampshire and also perhaps of Sussex. One of the best county teams in the late 18th century was Berkshire, which no longer has first-class status.

An important year was 1873, when player qualification rules came into force, requiring players to choose at the start of each season whether they would play for the county of their birth or their county of residence. Before this, it was quite common for a player to play for both counties during the course of a single season. At The Oval on 9 June 1873, the following rules were decided on:

The rules were gradually relaxed, but they still affected or delayed moves between counties by players, such as Tom Graveney in 1961 and Bob Willis in 1972. The removal in 1968 of residential duration rules for overseas players led to an influx of star names: Garfield Sobers, Clive Lloyd, Barry Richards and Richard Hadlee all signed for English counties. Yorkshire kept its own rule that players must have been born locally until 1992.

All County Championship matches prior to 1988 were scheduled for three days, normally of a nominal six hours each plus intervals, but often with the first two days lengthened by up to an hour and the final day shortened, so that teams with fixtures elsewhere on the following day could travel at sensible hours. The exception to this was the 1919 season, when there was an experiment with two-day matches played over longer hours, up to nine o'clock in the evening in mid-summer. This experiment was not repeated. From 1988 to 1992 some matches were played over four days. From 1993 onward, all County Championship matches have been scheduled for four days.