National Plates
Income Geography: The National Plate
An atlas of population becomes an atlas of livelihood when it turns to income, and this plate makes that turn at the national scale. In recent American Community Survey readings, the median income of Black households in the United States stands at roughly $57,000 — the midpoint of a distribution that runs from households with no cash income to the professional upper tier — against a national median for all households of about $78,000 to $80,000. The plate's work is the geography inside that gap: a state ladder with a distinctive top and bottom, a metropolitan pattern that rearranges the ranking, and a regional story that inverts some of what the distribution plates suggest.
The state ladder
Maryland stands at the top of the income ladder for Black households, with a median in the neighborhood of $85,000 to $90,000 in recent survey years — the highest of any state, carried by the federal and professional economy of the Washington suburbs and by Baltimore's professional class. The District of Columbia, a jurisdiction rather than a state, reads comparably high. Virginia, New Jersey, and the smaller states of Hawaii and Alaska follow, each pairing modest Black population shares with high household incomes. At the ladder's foot sit Mississippi and West Virginia, where Black median household incomes read in the high thirty-thousands, and the rural states of the deep South and Appalachia fill the lower rungs. The spread between top and bottom is more than two to one — the widest internal spread of any measure in this atlas's national plates.
The metro rearrangement
Metropolitan readings rearrange the state story in instructive ways. The Washington metro's Black median household income is the highest of any large metro in the country, and the high-income Black suburbs around it — Prince George's County most famously — record household incomes above the national median for all households. Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston read mid-ladder by state and higher by metro, because their Black populations are so heavily metropolitan. Conversely, the great northern metros read lower than their states' reputations suggest when the measure is restricted to Black households. The State Plates section carries an income plate for every state, and the Metro Plates an economy plate for each of the forty largest metros, so that the ladder can be read at the scale where households actually earn.
How to read an income plate
Three cautions govern every income figure in this atlas. First, the figures are household medians: they move with household size and the number of earners, not only with wages, and the plates say so wherever a comparison invites the confusion. Second, income and cost are separate maps — a $60,000 median in Jackson buys a different life than the same figure in San Francisco — and the atlas presents nominal figures as published, leaving cost adjustment to the reader rather than baking in an index. Third, the survey's annual readings move; the atlas draws its state income plates from the most recent American Community Survey one-year estimates and names the vintage on every table. The thematic income plates then take the measure apart by household type, age, and education, so the single national number this plate opens with is never mistaken for the whole story.
Income inside the atlas
The income measure returns in every section of this atlas, because it is the measure readers most often want next after location itself. Each state's income plate pairs the household median with the per-capita figure and the earnings medians for men and women working full time, since the three series tell visibly different stories in several states. Each metro's economy plate adds the industry mix that a place's incomes are earned in. The thematic income plates then cut the national figure by the dimensions a single median hides: by household type, where married-couple Black households read far above the overall median; by age, where earnings crest in the late working years; and by education, where the degree premium for Black workers can be set beside the nation's. None of those cuts is an argument; each is a table, sourced and dated by vintage, that lets the reader build the argument the data supports. The national plate's job is to make sure the reader starts that work with the ladder's true shape in mind: high at the federal-professional top, low at the rural bottom, metropolitan in its energy, and wider in its internal spread than any other measure the atlas draws.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Median household income, Black households (recent ACS) | About $57,000 nationally |
| Highest state median, Black households | Maryland, roughly $85,000-$90,000 |
| Other high-income states | District of Columbia (jurisdiction), Virginia, New Jersey, Hawaii, Alaska |
| Lowest state medians | Mississippi and West Virginia, roughly $36,000-$40,000 |
| Median household income, all households | About $78,000-$80,000 |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates; U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Demographic Profile. Method: Figures are drawn from the published federal sources named on this page, for the geography named; tile shading bands the published Black population share into the five legend classes. Counts are rounded as published by the source agency, and national benchmark rows are labeled with the basis they are published on.