About the site
County-level income data, written in plain language.
IncomeByCounty is independently published data journalism. We present the income and employment statistics that the federal government already collects — median household income, per capita income, labor force participation — for every one of America's 3,100+ counties.
What IncomeByCounty Is
IncomeByCounty is a data-journalism site, not a financial advisory. Our purpose is to take county-level income statistics published by the federal government and present them in a form a regular person can actually compare and act on. If you are researching a move, comparing wages across regions, or studying economic trends, this site is built for you.
Every page on the site is built from primary-source datasets: the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates and Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED). Each statistic is attributed to its source, and the underlying methodology — including the formula we use to compute composite income scores — is published on the methodology page.
Who Runs IncomeByCounty
IncomeByCounty is published and edited by Evan Brooks, Data Editor of the ByCounty Network. The site uses automated pipelines to ingest public datasets, then transforms them into plain-language reporting that anyone can use.
The data editor documents the methodology for composite scores and rankings across all 13 sites in the network, spot-checks AI-generated narratives for accuracy, and signs off on every published page. The data editor is the named editorial owner of this site: published statistics either match the source data or they are corrected.
The data editor is not a certified financial planner, economist, or licensed tax professional, and IncomeByCounty does not present itself as a financial advisory. We do not give investment, tax, or career advice. Our role is the data-editor role — verify the numbers, respect the underlying margins of error, and decline to publish anything that strays beyond what the source data supports.
Long-form features and reported pieces, when published, carry a visible byline and — for topics that benefit from subject-matter expertise — a named reviewer credit at the top of the article.
Why I Built IncomeByCounty
I started IncomeByCounty after trying to compare cost-of-living-adjusted wages across counties and finding the Census data buried in spreadsheets. The U.S. Census Bureau publishes extraordinary detail through the American Community Survey, but it is locked in tabular formats that most people never open. I wanted a site where a regular person could see, in 30 seconds, how their county compares on median household income, per capita earnings, and employment rates — with the sources right there on the page. No paywall, no gatekeeping, just public data presented honestly.
That same need shows up in every vertical we cover: property taxes, cost of living, crime, health, schools. The government already collects this data. Our job is to clean it, verify it, and make it comparable.
How We Decide What to Publish
Two documents govern this site's editorial decisions:
- Editorial Standards — our mission, source policy, AI-usage policy, corrections process, funding disclosure, and update cadence.
- Methodology — the exact data sources, composite-score formula, limitations, and update cadence behind every page.
Both documents carry a "Last reviewed" date and are regenerated when our methodology changes.
Our Relationship to the Data
IncomeByCounty is independent. We are not affiliated with the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve, or any government agency. We use their public datasets under the licenses they publish — for federal works, that is public-domain release. Each county page credits the data source that drives it.
When we link out — for example, to Census data portals or to Bureau of Labor Statistics employment reports — we link to primary sources, not aggregators.
AI in Our Workflow
Per-county pages include a short narrative summary generated with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) from the same statistics shown on the page. This is a tool for turning a row of numbers into a readable paragraph; it is not the source of any data on the site. The narrative prompt is constrained to forbid causation claims, policy recommendations, and unsourced inference. The Data Editor reviews the prompt and spot-checks output before publication. When source data is refreshed, narratives are regenerated.
We disclose this clearly because honesty is the right policy — and because Google's policies treat undisclosed AI authorship as a separate problem from AI authorship itself. The fix for AI prose on a data site is not to hide it; the fix is to pair it with a named human editor, a clear methodology, and source-grounded constraints. That is what we do.
Part of the ByCounty Network
IncomeByCounty is one site in the ByCounty Network — a family of independent data sites covering property taxes, cost of living, crime, health, schools, environmental risk, water quality, weather, and more. Visit CountyScore.com for the network's flagship hub, which combines every vertical's data into a single composite county report.
Contact
For data corrections, source attributions, partnership questions, or press inquiries, write to editorial@incomebycounty.com. See our editorial standards for the corrections process and timelines.
This page was last reviewed on by Evan Brooks, Data Editor.
← Back to Home