For median household income, education attainment and life expectancy, being higher than the US average means better.
For poverty rate, violent crime rate and median home price, being below the US average means better
What happened to you Michigan
Yeah but have you seen 8 months of winter? Minnesota welcomes you
As a PA resident, I’m gonna call BS on any metric that has Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska over us…and the Dakotas on the same level
Paid for by the National Flyover States Association.
Seriously seems a little surprising to me as someone from the Midwest
What is driving Michigan so low? That’s kind of insane to me as a person who lives here. What is your methodology?
Is this just the aggregate of times it’s higher than the average across all categories or is this an average of all scores?
Yes, the South is terrible. You can all stop moving here, please and thank you.
I have lived in a 4 a 2 and a 1 and this mostly checks out though I would give the 2 a 3.
If unemployment rate by state was included in the formula then many of the current 1’s would go up and many of the 5’s would go down.
Someone (maybe you) posted this the other day and deleted it because it was largely junk.
Even if it wasn’t, there’s no reason why low median home prices would necessarily be a good thing in the way low crime and low poverty is. Significantly more Americans live in a home they own than rent, and they’d probably prefer higher median prices.
Gonna be a bit honest, but also a bit biased, that after living in Minnesota for a LONG time that compared to the neighbors (of Minnesota) this is entirely accurate.
The downside is that it is also more heavily taxed than the nearby states. When you look at that, you can honestly see where the taxes go to when it comes to quality of the overall state infrastructure though.
This is not nuanced enough to be meaningful. At the county level, perhaps.
How is Hawaii so high? House prices… Educational attainment?… poverty rate…
That’s 3 there they wouldnt be over average.
NC being on the same level as WV is WILD. I’m from NC originally and live in VA now and the living experiences have been very similar. Nothing close to what you have here.
looks like a mix of expensive and less expensive states with scores in the 5. Iowa and Colorado and Washington all rank a 5 despite big differences in cost of living.
Woohoo home state of Minnesota!
This is a terrible, convoluted, effectively meaningless mess.
Looks like I’m moving to Minnesota
We’re #1! We’re #1! -Texas
Florida, West Virginia, and Indiana are too high.
Feels like these metrics will by default overly favors urban areas vs rural areas.
In general rural areas will have lower income, lower education (it is not needed for a majority of the jobs there), higher poverty rate (based on national standards), etc. They will have significantly lower medium house prices though, and just generally cheaper everything.
Thing is you could have a much better life with 50k in the country than with 100k in NYC but these metrics would say you don’t.
The map isn’t necessarily bad but all the metrics are quantifiable ones (which makes sense for a map like that) while most of the qualitative ones (quality of life, stress, environment, general happiness, etc) are not.
As a fellow Midwesterner, I’m also surprised by some of these rankings. The methodology behind them is definitely the most important factor here.
The funny thing about this data is that a lot of the “1” states you can still afford to buy a house lol
Having lived in California and Texas, and just recently visited Washington & Oregon on a 2 week long road trip, I understand their scores tbh
Anything using a national Poverty rate is going to be horribly skewed. $30k in Georgia and $30k in California are very different experiences.
Why is 1 the worst? Every state is above average in something?
This can’t be true about Kansas.
Considering income without considering expenses is an immediate nonstarter. People don’t live in expensive places unless there’s good reason like climate. Minnesota may rank #1 on these simplistic metrics but I would never want to live there, if for no other reason than the long winters and mosquito-infested summers.
How come the lower bound is 1? Surely there must be at least one or two states that are below average on every metric.
In what world is worse housing crisis a sign of higher standard of living?
Illinois, the state where Chicago is located, is a 5/6. I’m having some doubts as to the validity of this totally objective graphic.
New Jersey has a higher standard than Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, and Delaware, all states which ship their garbage to New Jersey?
as someone that lives in maine, my skepticism alarm is going off seeing us this high.
we do have low crime but in basically all other areas we are lacking…severely.
I feel like this map ain’t it
Notice the south?? Haha they all voted MAGA thinking it would help LOLOL
![[OC] US states rated by standard of living](https://www.europesays.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/8z6m18b41rlf1-1240x1024.png)
35 comments
Sources: [Median household income](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=249&eid=259515#snid=259516), [Education attainment ](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?eid=391444&rid=330), [Life expectancy ](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/state-life-expectancy/index_2021.htm), [Poverty rate ](https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acsbr-022.pdf), [Violent crime rate ](https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/downloads) and
[Median home price ](https://www.zillow.com/research/data/)
Tools: [Datawrapper ](https://www.datawrapper.de/)
For median household income, education attainment and life expectancy, being higher than the US average means better.
For poverty rate, violent crime rate and median home price, being below the US average means better
What happened to you Michigan
Yeah but have you seen 8 months of winter? Minnesota welcomes you
As a PA resident, I’m gonna call BS on any metric that has Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska over us…and the Dakotas on the same level
Paid for by the National Flyover States Association.
Seriously seems a little surprising to me as someone from the Midwest
What is driving Michigan so low? That’s kind of insane to me as a person who lives here. What is your methodology?
Is this just the aggregate of times it’s higher than the average across all categories or is this an average of all scores?
Yes, the South is terrible. You can all stop moving here, please and thank you.
I have lived in a 4 a 2 and a 1 and this mostly checks out though I would give the 2 a 3.
If unemployment rate by state was included in the formula then many of the current 1’s would go up and many of the 5’s would go down.
Someone (maybe you) posted this the other day and deleted it because it was largely junk.
Even if it wasn’t, there’s no reason why low median home prices would necessarily be a good thing in the way low crime and low poverty is. Significantly more Americans live in a home they own than rent, and they’d probably prefer higher median prices.
Gonna be a bit honest, but also a bit biased, that after living in Minnesota for a LONG time that compared to the neighbors (of Minnesota) this is entirely accurate.
The downside is that it is also more heavily taxed than the nearby states. When you look at that, you can honestly see where the taxes go to when it comes to quality of the overall state infrastructure though.
This is not nuanced enough to be meaningful. At the county level, perhaps.
How is Hawaii so high? House prices… Educational attainment?… poverty rate…
That’s 3 there they wouldnt be over average.
NC being on the same level as WV is WILD. I’m from NC originally and live in VA now and the living experiences have been very similar. Nothing close to what you have here.
looks like a mix of expensive and less expensive states with scores in the 5. Iowa and Colorado and Washington all rank a 5 despite big differences in cost of living.
Woohoo home state of Minnesota!
This is a terrible, convoluted, effectively meaningless mess.
Looks like I’m moving to Minnesota
We’re #1! We’re #1! -Texas
Florida, West Virginia, and Indiana are too high.
Feels like these metrics will by default overly favors urban areas vs rural areas.
In general rural areas will have lower income, lower education (it is not needed for a majority of the jobs there), higher poverty rate (based on national standards), etc. They will have significantly lower medium house prices though, and just generally cheaper everything.
Thing is you could have a much better life with 50k in the country than with 100k in NYC but these metrics would say you don’t.
The map isn’t necessarily bad but all the metrics are quantifiable ones (which makes sense for a map like that) while most of the qualitative ones (quality of life, stress, environment, general happiness, etc) are not.
As a fellow Midwesterner, I’m also surprised by some of these rankings. The methodology behind them is definitely the most important factor here.
The funny thing about this data is that a lot of the “1” states you can still afford to buy a house lol
Having lived in California and Texas, and just recently visited Washington & Oregon on a 2 week long road trip, I understand their scores tbh
Anything using a national Poverty rate is going to be horribly skewed. $30k in Georgia and $30k in California are very different experiences.
Why is 1 the worst? Every state is above average in something?
This can’t be true about Kansas.
Considering income without considering expenses is an immediate nonstarter. People don’t live in expensive places unless there’s good reason like climate. Minnesota may rank #1 on these simplistic metrics but I would never want to live there, if for no other reason than the long winters and mosquito-infested summers.
How come the lower bound is 1? Surely there must be at least one or two states that are below average on every metric.
In what world is worse housing crisis a sign of higher standard of living?
Illinois, the state where Chicago is located, is a 5/6. I’m having some doubts as to the validity of this totally objective graphic.
New Jersey has a higher standard than Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, and Delaware, all states which ship their garbage to New Jersey?
as someone that lives in maine, my skepticism alarm is going off seeing us this high.
we do have low crime but in basically all other areas we are lacking…severely.
I feel like this map ain’t it
Notice the south?? Haha they all voted MAGA thinking it would help LOLOL
Comments are closed.