Explore the map

Pick a measure and the whole country re-shades to it — affordability, income, home value, population, migration, jobs. The map ranks ingredients, it never decides a winner: darker green = better for the chosen measure (for affordability, unemployment, and home value, where lower is better, the ramp is reversed so green still means "good place to be"). Each measure shows its own latest available year. Hover a county for its stat card.

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Wikipedia summary & image licensed CC BY-SA. Each measure shows its own latest available year; a blank means no published figure for this county (honest absence, never a fabricated zero). Net migration is the IRS exemptions figure (≈ people).

What's blank, and why. The map plots the counties whose shape and data agree. A handful don't — and the project reports rather than fakes them (conformance check D7): Connecticut switched from counties to planning regions (income-based measures use the new regions; this GeoJSON still has old county shapes, so CT can read blank), and a few Alaska boroughs and renamed counties (Oglala Lakota SD, old Bedford city VA) sit on either side of a boundary revision. ~99.6% of the file's 3,221 county shapes match the star; coverage also varies by measure and year.

Top 10 — highest Cost-adjusted per-capita income

Bottom 10 — lowest Cost-adjusted per-capita income

The %ile column is each county's within-year national percentile for the selected measure (0% = lowest county, 100% = highest). For most measures higher is better; for unemployment a high percentile means more unemployment, and for affordability the percentile is oriented so high = more affordable. Highest / lowest above are by raw value — read them with the measure's own direction in mind.