The poorest counties in America

The typical household in Bell County, Kentucky takes in $31,354 a year. The national figure for an average household is $82,259. That difference is the widest in any county in the country with more than 10,000 residents.

Bell County sits in the coalfields where Kentucky meets Tennessee and Virginia. Second on the list is McDowell County, West Virginia at $31,559, another coal county, about 130 miles northeast. Third is Knox County, Kentucky, which borders Bell.

Kentucky has five counties in that top ten. Widen the frame to the poorest 100 counties in America and the concentration gets starker: Mississippi has 19 of them, Kentucky 16, Louisiana 10, Georgia 9, Alabama 9. Five states hold 63 of the poorest 100 counties in a nation of 3,143 counties.

Those five states are two different regions, and the counties got poor for different reasons. The Kentucky counties are Central Appalachia, where the coal economy shed most of its jobs and the people who could leave left. The Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Georgia counties are mostly the Black Belt and the Delta, plantation country where the land was worked by people who never got to own any of it.

Income and poverty rank different places

Median income tells you what the household in the middle earns. The poverty rate tells you how many households fall below the poverty line. The two usually move in the same direction, but the places where they don't can be revealing.

The highest poverty rate of any county over 10,000 people is Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota, at 57.6 percent. That's the Pine Ridge Reservation, and it's not close to second place. McCreary County, Kentucky is next at 38.9 percent, then Zapata County, Texas at 38.4.

Zapata and the other border counties are the clearest case of the two measures disagreeing. Starr County, Texas has a 33.5 percent poverty rate, ninth in the country, but doesn't appear in the poorest 30 by median income. Large households are part of it, since the poverty threshold rises with household size but median household income doesn't get adjusted for it. Read either measure alone on the border and you'll get a different answer.

Drop the 10,000-resident county floor and the list changes completely. Owsley County, Kentucky, population 3,932, has a median household income of $22,188, the lowest of any county in America. Four of the five poorest counties with no size floor have fewer than 7,100 residents. We use a floor on these lists because a county of 4,000 households produces a survey estimate with wide margins of error, and smaller counties have huge swing in numbers year to year.

What poor doesn't mean here

Low income is not the same as low cost. A $31,000 household income in Bell County buys a different life than $31,000 in a big area metro, since housing there costs a fraction of the national median. The counties aren't poor in the sense of people living on metro-priced goods with rural wages. It could be seen as affordable for the people living there.

They're poor in a more durable sense: no employer replaced the one that left, the working-age population keeps declining, and the tax base that funds schools and roads shrinks with it. The same counties turn up on our fastest-shrinking counties list. That's the part that compounds.

The opposite end of this is in the richest counties in America, where the top of the list runs above $180,000 and clusters just as tightly, mostly around Washington and a few coastal metros. The city version of this piece is the poorest cities in America.

The full ranked list of all 3,143 counties is at lowest income counties, with the poverty version at highest poverty counties. Both download as CSV.

Sources

Median household income and poverty rates are from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 5-year estimates, tables B19013 and S1701. The national figure of $82,259 is a population-weighted median across states. Counties below 10,000 residents are excluded from the ranked table because survey estimates for small populations carry wide margins of error; the unfiltered list is noted separately.