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 Illinois to lower ones like Texas and Florida (states with no income tax are Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, & Wyoming) . 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?
Do you mean Washington DC? Washington State isn’t a high tax state, Seattle has a high cost of living but the state does not have an income tax and property and sales tax are reasonable.
Additionally it had had a net in-migration for years. Additionally the sunbelt migration that had been the dominate story for a long time is slowing down.
Thanks for flagging that Max, I was going to add the list of states with no income tax to that sentence which includes Washington and then promptly forgot, and somehow Washington was on my mind from that list and I wrongly put it in the first part of the sentence. I wrote this post extremely quickly yesterday and admittedly got sloppy. I even had my old post of tax migration up to reference which clearly shows Washington State as a small migration on the plus side but in my haste I screwed it all up. Maybe I need to get AI to check my posts, which I would not be opposed to trying. But it will never write them 🙂
Hi Dave,
New Hampshire has neither income nor sales tax.
You are correct Joe and I missed them on the list. Clearly I need a reviewer! Also, New Hampshire is on my list of possible places to move to not because of the tax leniency but because the White Mountains are one of my favorite playgrounds.
Very cool map. I’ve built quite a few AI-assisted tools and visualisations as well, so I always enjoy this kind of data viz. As a European, I found it surprising that Mississippi is so high and Massachusetts is so low. I would have expected a bigger gap. In Europe, the richest countries can have median household incomes above $150k, while the poorest are closer to $10k, so the contrast tends to be much starker.
I think you meant why Mississippi is so low and Massachusetts high, but to answer the question the legacy of slavery in the deep south still has ramifications in the US. The northeast is much wealthier and the south and southeast are still dealing with the generations of poverty from the 1800’s. As for Europe, I’ve traveled extensively throughout the continent but most of is was 20 years ago. I thought wealth inequality was actually higher in the US, but I guess now that Europe has the rich Scandinavian countries as well as some of the quasi-Eastern block countries of the iron curtain days, those differences are probably big. When I was cruising around Europe many of those countries were not part of the EU. Thanks for the great comment and have fun prompting AI to code!