10 Richest States in America

Why the United States is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, that wealth is far from evenly distributed across the nation’s 50 states, with the ten richest states in America having mean household incomes as much as double those of some other states. Nor are they necessarily the states you would expect that are the richest in the country.

If you’re expecting New York and California to be on the list for example, you’ll be surprised to see them missing (well you won’t be surprised anymore, now that you know). This is particularly surprising given that New York and California have the greatest number of corporate CEO’s and billionaires in the country, along with Texas (which is also absent from the top ten), which should give them a major advantage considering this list uses mean statistics and not median (to which the upper and lower extremes of the scale are less important).

What this reveals is that despite great wealth at the top, there is an even greater pool of poverty at the bottom, while in the richest states in America, there may not be as many ultra-wealthy on top, but there is far less poverty on the lower end of the spectrum. It is perhaps inevitable in just about any state with a great population that there will be mass poverty, as many of the richest states are on the lower end of the population scale.

If you check out our previous list entitled The Secret List of the 10 Wealthiest States in America, you can get a different perspective on the subject. Though the data from that list is now a few years old, it ranks states by the overall wealth of the average person in each state (their net worth, as opposed to their annual income). Again, Texas is surprisingly absent from the top ten, though New York and California do squeak in.

Now then, let’s have a look at our newest list of the ten richest states in America.