The Highest-Earning And Lowest-Earning County In Each State

We tend to think about income inequality on a national scale, with Wall Street bankers in New York on one end of the spectrum and Walmart associates in rural West Virginia on the other. But income inequality is also a big problem within some states — namely, Virginia, New Mexico, Colorado, Maryland and Tennessee. Those are the five states with the biggest disparity between their highest-earning county and their lowest-earning county, according to a new map and graphic by the lending company TitleMax:

The map is informative in showing that the highest- and lowest-earning counties in each state are almost always geographically far away from each other, but the real wealth of information comes in the graphics below the map, which show just how much of an earning gap there is between the top and bottom county in each state, as well as the overall median income for each state.

Like all data visualizations, this graphic doesn't show the entire picture of how wealth is distributed around the country and within each state. There are a number of very high-earning and very low-earning counties that don't appear above, but only because they don't hold the superlative title in their state. For instance, according to TitleMax, Fairfax County and Arlington County, Virginia are both on the top 10 list of highest-earning counties in the country, but only Loudon County appears above. On the other end of the spectrum, Clay County, McCreary County and Harlan County, all in Kentucky, are among the the top 10 lowest-earning counties nationwide — but they're not quite as low-earning as Owsley County.

[TitleMax via Visual Capitalist]