The Census Bureau has created an interactive map that lets you see median household income by county. Median household income for the entire U.S. is $51,914, but of course there is enormous variety around the country. The map lets you select an amount and see which counties have medians below that level.
Three counties — Owsley and Breathitt in Kentucky and Brooks in south Texas — have median household incomes below $20,000 a year (the white spot in Louisiana is water):
So half of households in those areas are living on less than $20,000 a year.
If we go up to $30,000 a year, we see a clear pattern. The counties are particularly concentrated in the South, especially along the Mississippi River, in Appalachia, in southern Texas, a few areas of New Mexico, and several counties in South Dakota that include Native American reservations:
If we look at the $52,000 mark — right at the overall U.S. median — we see, unsurprisingly, a lot of counties on the coasts or that have at least mid-sized cities in them, though there are certainly some counties that don’t fit that pattern:
On the upper end, there are six counties where the median household income is above $100,000 — Hunterdon, in New Jersey; Howard, in Maryland; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and three Virginia counties, Fairfax, Falls Church, and Loudoun:
You can see the Census Bureau’s table of median household income in every county in the U.S. here.
Comments 20
Yrro Simyarin — October 17, 2012
Completely unsurprising that the areas around DC have the highest income :P
Dvd Avins — October 17, 2012
This is interesting, but of course the disparity would be much less if hourly wages and cost of rental housing were taken into account. There's tremendous real disparity in the country, but it's not as geographic as it appears.
INTERACTIVE MAP OF MEDIAN INCOME BY COUNTY « Welcome to the Doctor's Office — October 17, 2012
[...] SocImages The Census Bureau has created an interactive map that lets you see median household income by [...]
Guest — October 18, 2012
Falls Church is a city, not a county. And then there are people whose mailing address is Falls Church but do not live in the city of Falls Church, rather they live in Fairfax County. There is also a city of Fairfax in addition to the county. I had a lot of problems related to this at the DMV one year. Their computers couldn't handle it either.
Flaming Iguanas — October 19, 2012
Does anyone else find it weird that no city in California appears in the 100,000+ graph?
Yrro Simyarin — October 22, 2012
@decius:disqus The general economist consensus, as far as I can tell, is that minimum wages can reduce employment by eliminating some jobs whose return falls below the minimum wage, but that minor changes will not necessarily be detectable, and that it is not obviously clear either way which is a net win for poverty at the margins. Certainly one can set a minimum wage that is high enough to have a negative effect on a large number of poor people (and the people who depend on their services) -- there are arguments that "prevailing wages" set by white union workers, for example, have kept unskilled minority workers from being able to obtain entry level jobs and learn the skills necessary for higher employment. But those rates are usually seen as being significantly above what is normally set as a general minimum wage. Not to mention the concern over whether those lower paying "entry level" jobs can be exploitative.
So, on the margins normally discussed at least, there is not as much consensus on minimum wages as there is on rent controls.