The 10 States with the Highest Income; 10 States with the Lowest
Judging purely based on median yearly income, which currently sits at roughly $83,700, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest data, Americans are better off than perhaps they’ve ever been. But that metric can be deceiving, as it doesn’t capture the vast income disparity that’s rapidly becoming one of our country’s most pressing issues.
Depending on which state you survey, the median yearly income can vacillate widely, from $174,287 at the top to $50,090 at the bottom. However, as we’ve already noted, working purely off of medians can give bad data, so in its recent study, Wallethub used three key metrics to determine where each state fell in the annual income pecking order while taking income disparity into account: the average annual income of the top 5%, the average for the bottom 20%, and the median for all of each state’s residents.
The results were a surprisingly even distribution of states across the country, book-ended by Virginias, with Virginia (original recipe) coming in at No. 1 and West Virginia bringing up the rear.
At the top, Virginia’s underlying numbers were quite interesting, as it featured an enormous wealth disparity: The top 5% of earners in the state make an average of $545,097 per year, while the bottom 20% make an average of $19,671. However, because the respective levels of each are so high, the top 5% ranks as the second-highest in the nation, while the bottom 20% ranks fourth; the gap is less impactful in the ranking, as both the rich and the poor are simply doing better than folks in similar brackets in other states.
New York comes in at No. 2 and features a similarly massive gap between the top 5% and bottom 20%. The Empire State was able to overcome that disparity solely because of how high its high-end income was (No. 1 overall), while the bottom 20% ranked 45th.
At the bottom of the list is West Virginia, which touted bottom 5 scores in all three metrics (coming in 46th, 45th and 46th, respectively).
Here are the 10 states with the highest and 10 with the lowest annual incomes:
