The most and least unequal counties in America

The Census Bureau measures income inequality with the Gini index, a number between 0 and 1, where 0 would mean every household earns exactly the same and 1 would mean one household earns everything. The United States sits at 0.476. Manhattan is at 0.598, the highest of any county with at least 100,000 residents. Paulding County, Georgia, outside Atlanta, is at 0.359.

Two different roads to a high number

Manhattan and Orleans Parish reach nearly the same Gini for opposite reasons. Manhattan holds one of the largest concentrations of very high earners in the country alongside a large low-income population, so the top pulls the number up. New Orleans has fewer high earners and a much larger share of poor households: 27.1 percent of its households earn under $25,000, against a national figure of 14.6 percent.

Essex County, New Jersey contains both Newark and the wealthy suburbs of Millburn and Short Hills. Westchester and Collier County, Florida, home to Naples, follow the same pattern of extreme wealth sitting next to service-worker populations inside one county line.

The low-inequality counties are all outer suburbs. Paulding, Kendall, Stafford, Prince William, Anoka, and Charles are commuter counties where most households are in a similar middle band, with few very rich and few very poor residents. Stafford and Charles also appear among the highest-income counties for Black households, covered in where Black households earn the most.

At the state level the range is narrower. The District of Columbia and New York tie at 0.517, followed by Connecticut at 0.499 and Louisiana at 0.495. Utah is lowest at 0.427, then Alaska at 0.433. Iowa, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin all sit at 0.444.

Louisiana is the one state in the top four without a major financial center, and its position comes from the bottom of the distribution rather than the top. Three Louisiana parishes appear among the counties with the most households under $25,000.

What the index does and does not capture

The Gini index measures the spread of income in a single year. It says nothing about wealth, which is far more concentrated, and nothing about whether the same households stay at the bottom. A county where everyone is poor scores low, the same as a county where everyone is comfortable. Paulding County has a median household income of $98,031, well above the national figure; a uniformly poor county would produce a similar Gini for entirely different reasons.

The measure also stops at the county line. A metro area split into a wealthy county and a poor one can show low inequality in both while being sharply divided overall. National wealth figures, which show a much wider gap than income, are in the household wealth data.

Sources

Gini index values are from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 2020-2024 5-year estimates, table B19083, which measures household income inequality. Household income bracket shares are from table B19001. Counties shown have at least 100,000 residents. The national figure is a population-weighted average across states and differs slightly from the bureau's published national Gini.