The Richest and Poorest States

Think of it this way. You could move from Jackson, Mississippi, to Washington, D.C., do the same kind of work, and your per capita income would more than double. Not because you got smarter overnight. Not because you worked harder. Because the economic machinery around you — the industries, the employers, the density of high-paying jobs — is fundamentally different.

The BEA has published per capita personal income for every state since 1929. That gives us 95 years of data on a question that matters to anyone deciding where to live, where to invest, or where to build a business: which states are rich, which are poor, and is the gap closing?

The short answer is uncomfortable. The states at the top and bottom of this list have been at the top and bottom for nearly a century. The gap narrowed dramatically between 1930 and 1970. Then it froze.

The chart tells the story at a glance. DC sits alone at the top, $16,000 clear of any actual state. Then comes a cluster of wealthy northeastern and western states: Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, New York, Washington. At the bottom, a block of southern and Appalachian states that have occupied these same positions for generations.

Look at the middle. Florida ($73,006) sits right at the national average. Texas ($69,823) falls just below it. These two states — the biggest destinations for domestic migration in recent years — are solidly mid-pack, not the income powerhouses their booming populations might suggest.

DC is not really a state. It is a 68-square-mile city of lawyers, lobbyists, consultants, and federal employees. No rural counties pulling down the average. No manufacturing towns. Just the highest concentration of graduate degrees in the country and a federal payroll that never misses. Its $111,185 figure is a city-level statistic competing against state-level averages that include farmland and small towns. Still, it is real money flowing to real people.

Connecticut ($95,067) punches above its weight because of one town: Greenwich. The hedge fund capital of the world. Hartford’s insurance industry helps too, but the real pull comes from New York City money spilling across the border. Fund managers who want a yard and a lower tax bill settle in Fairfield County, and Connecticut’s per capita income goes up.

Massachusetts ($93,607) is the biotech and education story. The Route 128 corridor, the hospitals, the universities — Harvard, MIT, Boston University — anchor a knowledge economy that generates extraordinary income. Boston’s financial sector adds another layer. The result is a state where the average person earns $20,000 more than the national figure.

Wyoming ($86,477) is the surprise on this list. Population: 577,000 — the smallest of any state. When you divide mineral extraction revenue (coal, natural gas, trona) across that tiny denominator, per capita income spikes. Add in the lack of a state income tax, which draws wealthy transplants, and you get a ranching state that out-earns New York.

California ($86,232) and New York ($85,552) are the brute-force entries. They have enormous pockets of poverty — the Central Valley, the South Bronx — but Silicon Valley and Wall Street generate enough income to drag 40-million-person and 20-million-person averages above $85,000. That is a staggering amount of concentrated wealth.

The bottom of this list reads like a map of the former Confederacy. Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana. Add West Virginia and New Mexico, and you have the nine poorest states in America. They share a common profile: fewer college graduates, thinner knowledge-economy sectors, higher reliance on government transfer payments, and a persistent shortage of the industries — finance, tech, biotech, professional services — that push per capita income above $80,000.

Mississippi ($52,074) has been the lowest-income state for essentially the entire 95-year period the BEA has tracked this data. Its per capita income is 29% below the national average. That gap translates into real consequences: fewer hospitals per capita, lower school funding per student, less private investment per square mile. The cycle reinforces itself. Talented young people leave for Atlanta or Dallas, which drains the tax base, which reduces public investment, which makes the next generation more likely to leave.

West Virginia ($55,351) tells a different but equally stubborn story. Coal built its economy. Coal’s decline hollowed it out. The state lost population every decade from 1950 to 2020. The workers who remain are older, and the industries that replaced coal — largely healthcare and government — pay less.

The gap between the top 10 and bottom 10 is not small. The average per capita income for the top 10 is roughly $89,400. For the bottom 10, it is about $58,600. That is a $30,800 difference — enough to cover a year’s rent in most American cities.

Lined up side by side, the contrast is stark. DC’s $111,185 towers over Mississippi’s $52,074. Connecticut’s $95,067 dwarfs West Virginia’s $55,351. Even at the edges of the tiers — Colorado at $83,055 versus Georgia at $63,006 — the top-tier state earns $20,000 more per person.

Notice the shape of the green bars versus the red bars. The top 10 has a wide spread — DC is an outlier even among rich states. The bottom 10 is compressed. Mississippi and Georgia are separated by only $11,000. Poverty, it turns out, is more uniform than wealth.

National per capita income has risen from $699 in 1929 to $73,204 in 2024. That 105-fold increase is the tide that lifted every state. But it did not lift them equally.

Between 1930 and 1970, the gap closed fast. The New Deal poured money into the rural South. World War II industrialized agricultural states almost overnight. The GI Bill sent a generation of southerners to college. Interstate highways connected isolated towns to the national economy. Air conditioning made the Sun Belt livable. By 1980, the ratio between the richest and poorest states had narrowed from roughly 4:1 to about 2:1. It was one of the great economic equalizations in American history.

Then it stopped.

The shift to a knowledge economy in the 1980s and 1990s rewarded states that already had the infrastructure for it — universities, research hospitals, financial centers, tech clusters. San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, and New York pulled further ahead. The states that had been catching up found that catching up in the knowledge economy requires a different playbook than catching up in the manufacturing economy. The 2:1 ratio between top and bottom has been essentially frozen for 40 years.