Median Household Income in the United States

With a little help from browsing through census data and experimenting with QGIS, I found an easy way to visually display data sets by combining the US Census Bureau’s TIGER data with data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. In particular, I used data that measured the median household income among 72,538 census tracts.

The generated maps show median household incomes for the contiguous 48 states, grouped by census tract (average of 4,000 people per tract). Dark teal areas are high median income (highest being around $250,000), white areas are around the median income (approximately $50,000), and dark brown areas are low median income (lowest being around $4,000). The graduated color scale is based on quantiles, where each shade of color corresponds to an equal count of census tracts.

Notes about the data:

• Data was only used from the contiguous (lower 48) states. Alaska and Hawaii census tracts were…