About State Dashboards

Take the Tour

New here? This three-minute walkthrough covers every part of the dashboard: switching between states, reading the metric cards, opening a metric for the deep-dive chart, the 50-state ranking, and rank history.

Why State Dashboards

Every state has plenty of data, but rarely an honest answer to a simple question: how is this state doing, compared with the others?

State Dashboards is a 50-state scorecard of outcomes, tracking a “critical few” measures across Safety & Health, Affordability, Economy & Workforce, Education, and Infrastructure & Trust. Each state has its own dashboard with trend charts, 50-state rankings, and rank history.

Whether you’re a resident, a journalist, a researcher, or a policymaker, the numbers are the same. Draw your own conclusions.

How These Metrics Were Chosen

Every metric must pass eight criteria. A metric that fails any one of them is excluded, regardless of how interesting it might be.

1. Important to residents. Captures something that directly affects daily life: safety, health, cost of living, jobs, education, infrastructure.
2. What people live with, not what government does. Measures what residents actually experience and the conditions that shape those experiences, not government activity or output.
3. Influenced by state policy. The state government has meaningful levers to move the needle, whether through legislation, regulation, funding, or executive action.
4. Consistent and nonpartisan. Sourced from authoritative federal agencies (FBI, Census Bureau, BLS, BEA, CDC, EIA, HUD, NCES, HRSA, FHWA, and others) that report data using the same methodology for all 50 states.
5. Long time series. Available over enough years to show real trends, separating signal from noise.
6. Clear direction. Every metric has an unambiguous “better” or “worse” direction.
7. Non-redundant. Each metric tells a distinct part of the story.
8. A “critical few”. Most state dashboards track scores of metrics, suitable for researchers. For residents, too much data obscures as much as too little. These 27 cover the key dimensions of resident well-being without losing the signal.

How States Are Compared

“Median” is the 50-state mathematical median. DC and Puerto Rico are excluded. We use median rather than mean because state distributions are often right-skewed, and a few outlier states would pull the mean away from what a typical state looks like.

“Better” and “worse” reflect the direction of each metric. Lower crime and unemployment are better; higher graduation rates and incomes are better.

Rankings run from #1 (best) to #50 (worst).

Tiers. For each metric, the 50 states are grouped into three tiers by rank: Top tier (ranks 1–16), Middle tier (ranks 17–33), and Bottom tier (ranks 34–50). The label is direction-aware, so “Top tier” always reads as good for the state, whether higher or lower values are better on that metric.

Inflation adjustment. Per Capita Income is shown in constant 2017 dollars using BEA’s Real Personal Income (SARPI) methodology, which adjusts for both regional price differences (RPPs) and national inflation (PCE price index). A flat line means no real income growth.

Using This Data

The numbers behind every chart come from federal agencies and public research organizations and are not owned by State Dashboards. You’re free to use the data, charts, and rankings in your own reporting, research, testimony, and presentations.

Getting the numbers. Click any metric to open its detail view, then:

• Download .xlsx in the modal exports the full series for the selected state and the U.S. median, ready to drop into Excel or Google Sheets.
• Share in the modal copies a permanent link to that exact metric, state, and view. Paste it into a doc or a slide so readers land where you did.
• Bulk CSVs live at statedashboards.org/data/{metric}_state.csv. One file per metric, all 50 states and years, the same numbers the dashboard renders.

Suggested citation.

State Dashboards, [Metric Name] — [State], [Year]. statedashboards.org

If you want to credit the underlying data, the modal lists the original federal source for every metric (FBI, Census, BLS, BEA, CDC, NCES, HRSA, HUD, EIA, FHWA, and others). Citing both is best for testimony and research; the source-only citation is fine for casual reference.

Sibling Project

State Dashboards is a sibling to the Hawaiʻi Dashboard, which carries the same 27 federal metrics for Hawaiʻi with additional county-level views and narrative context. Both projects share the same data pipeline and methodology.