United States residents are doing better financially than they were 50 years ago, according to a new analysis by the Urban Institute.
Or so it appears. The median U.S. household makes $77,719, $18,790 more than the median household of 1970. That’s an increase of 31.9% over five decades after adjusted for inflation.
Still, economic growth varies widely between different states.
The state with the highest growth was Utah, with median income rising 78% since 1970, up to $93,421, the Urban Institute reported.
Louisiana saw growth but less of it. The state’s median household earned $58,229 in 2023, a 25.8% increase since 1970. Louisiana’s ranking among states in 1970 was 48th and the state stayed at that ranking again in 2023. Only West Virginia and Mississippi had lower incomes.
In New Orleans, income cannot be analyzed without noting sharp racial inequities. In 2021, white households in the city earned a median of $83,727 while Black households earned a median of $30,292, a 64% gap, the Data Center found. Another even wider gap flows from that disparity: 51% of Black children in New Orleans live in poverty, compared with 5% of white children.
In the Urban Institute analysis, West Virginia was the only state that did not see growth over 50 years; it saw a .4% drop in income since 1970 and ended up in 2023 with $55,948 in median income, putting it 49th in the nation, just behind Louisiana and just above Mississippi, the lowest state in the nation, where the median household income was $54,203.
The statewide factor that most correlated with upward shifts in state median household income was educational attainment, Urban Institute data showed.
All states experienced a sizable increase in residents with a bachelor’s degree from 1970 to 2023. But states with more sizable increases in residents with bachelors’ degrees also had larger increases in median household income.
Overall, the percentage of U.S. residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher is 36.4%.
The lowest rates of people with bachelor’s degrees are seen in the nation’s three lowest-income states: Louisiana (27.8%), West Virginia (24.4%) and Mississippi (27%).
Residents in states with increased bachelor’s degrees may earn higher incomes, the study suggests. Or better-paying jobs could attract people with more schooling to those states.
Positive income growth is also associated with a state’s increase in population that is foreign-born, the Urban Institute found. “This could reflect that immigration leads to economic growth, that immigrants seek out areas that have demonstrated high economic growth, or both,” Urban Institute analysts concluded.
In 2024, 14.8% of people living in the U.S. were foreign-born, according to the Visual Capitalist’s analysis of census data. The highest rates can be found in California, which has 27.7% foreign-born; New Jersey (25%); Florida (23.1%) and Texas (18.4%).
Louisiana, with 5.2% foreign born, has long had fairly low immigration rates. The states with the lowest foreign-born rates in the nation include Mississippi (2.7%); West Virginia (2.1%) and Montana (2.1%).
Minnesota, the site of the nation’s most recent immigration enforcement, had 9% foreign residents in 2024, according to Visual Capitalist’s analysis.
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