The backbone: nearly every demographic, social, economic, and housing measure, down to
census tract.
Sources
U.S. public data producers, ordered by how central they are to county-level demographic and health data. Sources tagged In dataset currently feed this site's measures; the rest are key references.
Which poverty measure to use?
The official national poverty figures come from the Current Population Survey
(CPS-ASEC).
For state and lower-level geographies (county and below), the Census Bureau recommends
the American Community Survey (ACS) for income and poverty-rate estimates.
Guidance from Alemayehu Bishaw, Survey Statistician, Poverty Statistics Branch (SEHSD),
U.S. Census Bureau, 2022.
Core — the workhorses
The authoritative cause-of-death / mortality data at county level. It is also the raw
input for this site's life-expectancy and premature-death figures — but note those are
author-calculated here (5-year pooled), not CDC-published statistics.
Model-based health outcomes, prevention, risk behaviors, and disability at county and
tract — the best small-area health estimates.
Best small-area income & poverty estimates — county and school-district level.
Best small-area health-insurance coverage estimates.
The annual homelessness count. HUD reports by Continuum of Care (CoC),
not by county, and publishes no official county crosswalk — so the county figures here come from an
author-built CoC-to-county crosswalk, not official HUD county statistics. See the
HUD CoCs page for every CoC by state.
The deepest county-level medical data available — 60+ services and conditions —
plus facility, hospital, and provider files.
Strong secondary
The health survey that underlies PLACES; usable directly at state / large-area level.
Current-year population where ACS lags (the basis many aggregators use).
Vital-statistics umbrella — births and deaths.
Fatal-injury and violent-death detail by area, race, and cause.
HIV, STD, hepatitis, and TB surveillance at county level.
Health workforce and facilities — maps, data, and dashboards.
National Survey on Drug Use and Health — substance use & mental health.
Hospital utilization and cost data, tools, and visualizations.
Single-domain authorities — the top source for one topic
The definitive US crime source. City, state, and national coverage — county is limited
(needs more research).
Air-quality readings from 5,000+ monitors; coverage follows monitor locations rather than
full counties.
The primary federal database on public K–12 schools and districts.
Foster care (AFCARS) and child abuse & neglect (NCANDS / NDACAN); mostly state-level,
with some county detail.
Kindergarten vaccination rates by nation and state (no county on the site).
Broader / infrastructure
Monthly Current Population Survey plus the annual social & economic supplement.
Environmental-health indicators at county level.
The full 10-year count — the baseline everything else builds on.
Harmonized microdata — an access layer over ACS, CPS, and many other sources.
Emerging / at-risk
Wastewater-based tracking of COVID and a dozen-plus pathogens — ~1,300 sites covering
~144M people, near real-time. Limited coverage and facing a funding cliff (no CDC funding past
Sep 30, 2026 unless Congress restores it), but a promising early-warning signal. See also the
privately-funded WastewaterSCAN
(Stanford / Emory / Verily), which isn't exposed to the federal cuts.
Measure-level source, vintage, and field IDs for every column that feeds this site are
published in data/FullDataSet_columns.csv.
Major National Health Surveys
The survey instruments many of the health sources above draw on, with approximate annual sample sizes. Most report at national (some state) level rather than county.
NHIS — National Health Interview Survey CDC / NCHS
Sample sizes verified against official source pages, latest releases 2023–2024. Surveys refresh annually or biennially — recheck yearly.
Dashboards
Tools and sites that present this data, ranked best-first. A few are also data producers (tagged Also a source); geography tags show how deep each goes. Status verified Jul 2026.
Best — start here
The definitive county-to-county health ranking within each state. Note: RWJF funding ends
Dec 2026 — the 2025 release was the last full annual ranking, so treat as end-of-life.
The best small-area health estimates as an interactive map/portal — county, place, ZCTA,
and census tract. 2025 release.
Broad demographic, economic, and housing measures with maps and charts; counties and places
5,000+. Back online and current (V2025 population, ACS 2020–2024).
Compare metro vs. nonmetro counties nationally and by state; 50+ indicators with unusually
strong source documentation.
Sub-county health across 970+ cities down to the tract level. RWJF-funded — the same
funder exiting County Health Rankings, so worth monitoring.
1,000+ county indicators across ~100 datasets, updated monthly, with map, profiles, and a
data-extraction tool.
Clean ACS profiles with state and national comparison down to census tract; current to the
2024 ACS (updated Feb 2026).
800+ health and health-policy indicators by state, with maps, rankings, and a custom
state-report builder.
Also strong
Hundreds of sources unified; place explorer, rankings, and natural-language queries down to
sub-county.
County cancer incidence and mortality, ranked. Incidence 2018–2022, mortality
2019–2023 (NCI + CDC).
State health rankings, annual (2025 report); 99 measures from 31 sources.
Child well-being measures by state and county (some to city / district). Moved to
datacenter.aecf.org.
Plain-language ACS profiles for a single area, county and tract. Single-geography — no
cross-area compare.
Profiles for congressional districts and tribal areas — geographies most tools skip.
Archived (no longer updated, kept for reference): 500 Cities (→ PLACES), Dartmouth Atlas, Opportunity Atlas, Measure of America, BCBS Health Index, Economic Innovation Group DCI.
Research tools
Not data portals — tools for the literature that sits behind the data. Kept in its own section, and deliberately not ranked: the one below is mine, and slotting it into a best-first list of other people's work would not be honest.
DOI-Ref-Lookup
My own project
Paste a DOI — or up to fifteen at once — or an ISSN, ISBN, ORCID or PMID, and
get the article metadata, journal quality metrics, ready-to-copy citations (APA, AMA, Vancouver, MLA), and
a CSV export. Anything else you type searches CrossRef. A Connections view graphs a paper's
references and the works citing it, in the spirit of Connected Papers. There is also a Chrome extension
that puts a “Ref” link beside every DOI on a page.
The part worth having on this page is the retraction check. A retracted paper does not stop being cited — and a source you cannot trust is the same problem this site spends its time on, one field over.
The link above is a live example, and not a random one: it resolves Estimating County-Level Mortality Rates Using Highly Censored Data From CDC WONDER — a paper on the suppression rule that withholds any death count under ten. That rule is precisely what the Life Expectancy page had to be built around, so the example is also worth reading.
Disclosure: I built it. It is free, has no ads and needs no account, same as this site.