Category · 2 articles
State Rankings
Data-driven rankings of U.S. states across cost of living, income, education, housing affordability and growth.
What you'll find here
Articles in State Rankings sit at the intersection of public data and lived experience. Every piece starts from a specific Census table, traces the number back to the household-level question that produced it, and then asks the harder question: what does this actually mean for the people, places, and markets it describes?
We avoid the two failure modes of most data writing: throwing a chart on a page and assuming it speaks for itself, or over-interpreting a single year of estimates as a trend. Where a finding warrants caveats — margin of error, geographic crosswalks, ACS1 vs ACS5 trade-offs — those caveats are in the body, not buried in a footnote.
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The Richest States in America, by Census Median Household Income
Maryland, New Jersey, and Massachusetts top the U.S. by household income. The bottom of the list is dominated by the Deep South. Here's the full picture, and the surprises in the middle.
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