U.S. State Comparisons: Income, Housing, Demographics

Most published state rankings cherry-pick metrics, change definitions year to year, or blend incompatible vintages of data. The result is rankings that disagree wildly with each other and confuse more than they clarify. City Zip Compare's approach is the opposite: every state is reported on the same set of ACS5 variables from the same vintage, and the methodology page documents exactly which Census tables we use.

This makes apples-to-apples comparison straightforward. The /rankings hub lets you sort all 50 states across each metric we track.

The defining pattern across U.S. states is the high-income / high-housing-cost trade-off. Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Hawaii and California all combine top-quintile incomes with top-quintile housing costs. Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama and Kentucky combine bottom-quintile incomes with bottom-quintile housing costs. Texas and Florida sit in the middle on both axes.

What's interesting is the off-diagonal: states where housing is meaningfully cheap relative to income (much of the Midwest), or where housing is meaningfully expensive relative to income (parts of the Mountain West where prices ran ahead of wages between 2020 and 2023). Those are the states where affordability stories deviate most sharply from headline cost-of-living indices.

State demographics are diverging. The Sun Belt is younger and growing; the Northeast and parts of the Midwest are older and shrinking. Educational attainment varies dramatically — Massachusetts, Colorado, Maryland and Vermont have the highest bachelor's-degree shares; West Virginia, Mississippi and Arkansas the lowest. These differences compound over time and shape almost every other social and economic outcome.