The Income Scoreboard

Nine episodes. Ninety-five years of data. Four BEA datasets. And now, one final table that puts it all together.

Over this series, we traced American personal income from its 105-fold growth since 1929 through the shifting sources of where the money comes from, the explosion of government transfers, the quiet resilience of property income, and the stubborn gap between richest and poorest states. We watched wages lose their dominance, taxes reshape the map, disposable income reveal the real winners, and farm income collapse from 8.2% to nearly nothing.

This capstone ranks all 51 states across every dimension — and distills the ten defining takeaways from the entire journey.

The horizontal bar chart above is the simplest and most complete picture of American income geography. DC’s $111,185 towers over everyone else — a 17% premium over second-place Connecticut. That gap reflects D.C.’s unique status as a city-state packed with federal workers, lawyers, lobbyists, and consultants in one of the smallest, wealthiest jurisdictions on Earth.

Below DC, a cluster of wealthy coastal states — Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, California, Washington — dominates the top ten. Wyoming sneaks in at number four ($86,477) thanks to its tiny population and outsized property income, which we explored in Episode 4. At 37.8%, Wyoming’s property income share is the highest in the nation by far.

Then there is the long middle: 30 states clustered between $60,000 and $75,000, separated by just a few thousand dollars each. And at the bottom, the familiar roster — West Virginia, Alabama, New Mexico, Kentucky, Arkansas — all below $60,000. Mississippi, at $52,074, trails by a wide margin.

The second chart overlays what people earn with what they keep. The gap between the two bars is the effective tax burden — the combined federal, state, and local taxes that shrink each dollar of income into disposable income.

Some states barely flinch. Wyoming loses just 10.5% — dropping from #4 in PCI to a comfortable #4 in DPI at $77,361. Washington’s 10.7% tax rate vaults it from #8 in total income to #5 in disposable income. New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas all gain ground after taxes, a pattern we first documented in Episode 8.

Others get hammered. New York drops from #7 to #10 after losing 15.8% to taxes. California falls from #6 to #7 despite having the nation’s largest economy. DC still leads after taxes ($92,365), but the $18,820 it surrenders per capita is the largest tax bite of any state — enough to exceed the entire per capita income of some nations.

The no-income-tax states gain 3 to 5 ranking spots after the adjustment, exactly as Episode 7 predicted. The after-tax map of America looks different from the pre-tax map.

Every metric from every episode, compressed into a single table. Per capita income and its national rank. Disposable income after taxes. The effective tax rate. Transfer dependence — how much comes from government. And farm income share, the ghost of an older America. Scroll through all 51 states.

Read the table vertically, and patterns jump out. The tax column ranges from 7.9% (Alaska) to 16.9% (DC), a 9-percentage-point spread that reshuffles the rankings significantly. The transfer column is where the real divide lives: Utah and Colorado draw just 13% of income from government programs, while West Virginia draws nearly 30%. That is not a small difference — it means three of every ten dollars flowing into West Virginia come from Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or other government transfers, a dependency pattern we traced in Episode 3.

The farm column is the most dramatic. Forty states round to essentially zero. But South Dakota (4.30%), Iowa (2.93%), Nebraska (2.69%), and North Dakota (2.32%) still carry the remnants of an agricultural economy that once defined the nation. As Episode 9 documented, farm income fell from 8.2% of national income to 0.43% — the most severe structural collapse in the BEA dataset. These few farm-belt holdouts are the last places in America where agriculture still registers as a meaningful share of personal income.

Over ten episodes and 95 years of BEA data, the American income story condensed into ten defining findings:

If there is one lesson from ranking all 51 states across every dimension, it is how persistent the geography of income is. The Deep South — Mississippi, West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina — has occupied the bottom of the income rankings for as long as BEA data exists. These states share a signature: low per capita income, low tax rates, high transfer dependence, and weak private-sector wage growth. Every episode of this series found them in the same place.

The Northeast corridor and Pacific Coast occupy the top, with high incomes, high taxes, and relatively low transfer dependence. Between them sits a vast middle America where states cluster within a few thousand dollars of each other — close enough that a single industry boom or bust can shuffle the rankings for a year, but not close enough to the top to challenge the coastal leaders.

The three structural transformations. If we compressed 95 years of income data into three shifts, they would be: the rise of government transfers from almost nothing to nearly a fifth of all income; the decline of wages from a commanding majority to a bare half; and the near-total collapse of farm income from a defining economic force to a rounding error. Everything else — the property income stability, the tax oscillation, the geographic divides — is a footnote to these three changes.