US Counties With the Highest Material Security Scores
3,108 US counties ranked by material security score, from highest to lowest. First are Morgan County, UT (1.83), Los Alamos County, NM (1.82) and Kalawao County, HI (1.71). The middle one of the 3,108 has 0.252.
What this measures
Poverty, child poverty, income inequality, and four basic-needs measures from CDC PLACES: food, housing, utilities and transport. It is flipped so higher means less hardship, which is why it is named for security, not for what it counts. Source: .
A standard deviation is a typical gap between places.
For most measures, a national ranking mostly sorts places by income and by how urban they are. Each county’s own page compares it with the 50 counties most like it instead, which is often the fairer view.
The 100 highest counties
Every state, highest first
Each state’s own published figure, not an average of its counties.
| Rank | State | standard deviations |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | New Hampshire | 1.36 |
| 2 | Hawaii | 1.14 |
| 3 | Vermont | 1.07 |
| 4 | Minnesota | 0.969 |
| 5 | Utah | 0.93 |
| 6 | North Dakota | 0.928 |
| 7 | Iowa | 0.914 |
| 8 | Wisconsin | 0.826 |
| 9 | Nebraska | 0.805 |
| 10 | Massachusetts | 0.747 |
| 11 | Maryland | 0.743 |
| 12 | Alaska | 0.65 |
| 13 | Virginia | 0.601 |
| 14 | Washington | 0.598 |
| 15 | Maine | 0.594 |
| 16 | Delaware | 0.586 |
| 17 | Rhode Island | 0.571 |
| 18 | Idaho | 0.546 |
| 19 | Colorado | 0.467 |
| 20 | South Dakota | 0.402 |
| 21 | Connecticut | 0.378 |
| 22 | Montana | 0.364 |
| 23 | Kansas | 0.338 |
| 24 | Wyoming | 0.322 |
| 25 | New Jersey | 0.318 |
| 26 | Indiana | 0.308 |
| 27 | Oregon | 0.298 |
| 28 | Pennsylvania | 0.253 |
| 29 | Michigan | 0.229 |
| 30 | Illinois | 0.193 |
| 31 | Ohio | 0.159 |
| 32 | Missouri | 0.077 |
| 33 | California | 0.0683 |
| 34 | North Carolina | -0.0258 |
| 35 | Arizona | -0.0792 |
| 36 | District of Columbia | -0.281 |
| 37 | New York | -0.294 |
| 38 | Nevada | -0.456 |
| 39 | Florida | -0.462 |
| 40 | South Carolina | -0.529 |
| 41 | Kentucky | -0.558 |
| 42 | New Mexico | -0.602 |
| 43 | Oklahoma | -0.647 |
| 44 | West Virginia | -0.691 |
| 45 | Tennessee | -0.718 |
| 46 | Georgia | -0.754 |
| 47 | Alabama | -0.811 |
| 48 | Arkansas | -0.851 |
| 49 | Louisiana | -1.02 |
| 50 | Texas | -1.03 |
| 51 | Mississippi | -1.25 |
More on material security score
- US Counties With the Lowest Material Security Scores
- Material security score by US county: map by year and what it goes with
A ranking describes places, not the people in them, and a high or low place does not by itself say why. All US rankings.