What Was The Median Household Income In America In 2024?

For years on this blog I mined the official U.S. Census Bureau income data every September and took the time to format it and map it.  Examples can be seen here, here, and here.

Mapping, more specifically geographic information systems (GIS), is what I did for a living and taught at a local college, so I had to know-how and software. 

Then some other FIRE bloggers who had good coding skills started doing interactive versions, and as much as I wanted to learn how to code it myself to be interactive online I just didn’t have the drive. 

I do have some coding experience but it’s mostly in obscure and proprietary software languages.  So the last time I posted about it was in October of 2023 which mapped the median household income by state for 2022. 

The official Census data doesn’t come out until September for the year prior, so this coming September we’ll get the data for 2025. 

But here we are in 2026 and artificial intelligence can code for you. 

My Promise To You…

* Important – I pledge to you my readers that I will NEVER use AI to write prose.  Never means never, not even a sentence. 

Why would anyone want to read a blog written by computer code?  Sure it has uses and I’m not saying it’s evil, but not for a blog that’s trying to relate to people.  If I want to read a simple factual 2-sentence account of what happened on on Wall Street today and Bloomberg uses AI to kick that out – which they’re surely already doing – then okay.  But you will never get AI writing here. 

On the other hand, I have no problem using AI to code stuff I can’t code.  I already did it twice with two quizzes I published just for fun.  I couldn’t figure out the html code to make images pop up based on choices and to make a quiz that gets scored.  But AI did. 

As I’ve been playing with AI and giving it more coding tasks I’ve been astonished.  It’s getting good, real good.  So I went for it and asked it to mine the 2024 Census Bureau income data, and make an interactive map for me that will work in a WordPress blog.  It only took a few tweaks after the first try to fix some errors and I got what I wanted. 

Not only is it doing something in 3 minutes that took me hours to do, it’s doing it in an interactive way. 

So if you’re on a phone this may not work but if you’re on a full computer you can hover your mouse over a state in the map below and get a nice popup of the median household income.  It did all of this in html with some javascript and gave it to me – free. 

It’s a whole new world.

Self Indulgent

These posts are totally self indulgent.  I’m a geographer and love mapping and geeking out over spatial trends.  Make those trends or subjects about money or related to finance and I’m even more fascinated. 

Since 2020 there’s been a mass exodus from higher tax states like California and Washington to lower ones like Texas and Florida.  That’s both people and businesses.  And other things such as the natural gas boom and then massive bust in North Dakota have radically changed maps like these over time.  I love following the trends.

So now that AI can do this kind of stuff for me I might do it more often.  I did all kinds of mapping posts in the past, not just related income.  You can see most of them here. 

I still have to write stuff along with the map, and that’s where I’ll admit I don’t have as much drive to do with my blog having maybe 1/100th of the readership that it used to have in 2019 – 2020.

I’m more excited about making music these days, which I’ll shamelessly plug again from my last post. 

We’ll see, retirement is whatever I want it to be, that’s the point innit?