About This Graph

This graph displays the mean amount of weekly earnings for a state’s population.

About Income & Equity

In this section we are measuring incomes at the family level and are looking at total family income, which determines the economic resources available to that family.

Because a state's economic performance should be assessed not only on how many jobs it produces, and for whom, but on the level of earnings in those jobs, we explore earnings in detail in this section. Higher earnings (as well as higher employment) imply that individuals and families have access to more economic resources, which, in addition to helping them, is beneficial to state finances, with higher tax revenue and less dependency on public support.

The section also explores the poverty rate and measures the fraction of families below some predetermined level of income needed to satisfy a given level of needs.

The data are from monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) files. All individual- or family-level data in the CPS are used with population weights. The median is the value such that 50 percent of observations have higher earnings, and 50 percent of observations have lower earnings. The United States averages are calculated as unweighted averages over all states. Individuals are white if they classify themselves as white in the CPS questionnaire. Individuals that are white can be Hispanic. Individuals are classified as black if they identify themselves as black prior to 2003; after 2003 individuals are also classified as black if they identify themselves as white-black or white-black-Asian. Individuals that are black can be Hispanic. Individuals are classified as Hispanic if they identify themselves as Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Other Spanish, or Central/ South American. Individuals that identify themselves as Hispanic can also be white, black, Asian, or other. Data for minorities in some states – especially small states – can be quite imprecise; see Appendix D of the report for details.