Mapping American Incomes

Graphicacy has mapped out the Median Household Income in every census tract area in the United States. Graphicacy's interactive map shows the average median income in over 73,000 census tracts between 2013 and 2017. The map uses data from the American Community Service.

If you click on a census tract on the interactive map you can view the median household income in that tract recorded by the ACS. Being able to create over 73,000 interactive and responsive polygons on one interactive map is not a trivial accomplishment. Graphicacy was able to achieve this feat by using Tippecanoe to convert a GeoJSON file of the geographical data into a Mapbox tileset.

This tileset was then styled using Mapbox Studio. In Mapbox Studio line and fill styles were able to be applied to the geographical data of the U.S. census tracts. The actual median household income choropleth styles are applied on the client side by Mapbox GL JS using Mapbox expressions. Different fill-colors are applied to the individual census tracts based on the underlying median income data.

You can read more about how Graphicacy created their interactive map on their walk-through guide A performant Mapbox implementation of Census Tracts at all zoom levels.

If you are interested in where in America people earn the highest median household incomes then you might be interested in Bloomberg's interactive map of Neighborhoods Earning Over $200,000. Bloomberg's map uses American Community Survey data to show the number of housholds earning over $200,000 in each county. You can also view the 3 counties with the highest median household incomes in each state on Four Pillar Freedom's interactive map. The three richest counties in each state are colored blue on this map. Beneath the map Four Pillar Freedom has listed the three richest counties and graphed the median household incomes in each state.