The Poorest Counties In The United States

The United States mints more millionaires than any country on Earth. It also contains counties where the typical household lives on less than a quarter of the national income. Both things are true at the same time, and the gap is not an accident of bad luck.

America's poorest counties cluster in three kinds of places, each with its own history. In the Mississippi Delta and Alabama's Black Belt, a plantation economy built on enslaved labor never gave way to anything that paid, and the Great Migration that carried roughly six million Black Americans out of the South between 1916 and 1970 thinned the workforce that stayed behind. In the Appalachian coalfields, a single industry boomed for a century and then collapsed, taking the paychecks with it. On the Northern Plains, reservation counties carry the long economic weight of dispossession. Different roads, same destination: median household incomes that would not cover rent across much of the country.

One caution on the figures below. For counties this small, the U.S. Census Bureau's income estimates carry wide margins of error and bounce around from one survey to the next, so read the dollar amounts and the exact order as close approximations rather than a photo finish. The national median sits at roughly $83,700 as of 2024. Every county here comes in under $41,000.

1. Issaquena County, Mississippi - $17,109

Fewer than 1,400 people live in Issaquena County, which makes it the least populous county in Mississippi and, by most counts, the poorest in the country. It sits flat and low in the Delta, founded in 1844 and named for a Choctaw phrase meaning "deer creek," with a national wildlife refuge taking up part of its farmland. The economy has always run on agriculture, cotton above all. In 1860, the enslaved made up more than nine in ten residents, and the plantation system that depended on them never diversified into anything else after emancipation. Mistreatment of freed farmers continued deep into the 20th century, and the county's revenue base left with the people who fled it.

2. Holmes County, Mississippi - $24,958

Holmes County has stayed majority Black through every decade of the Great Migration, which sets it apart from most of this list. It takes its name from David Holmes, Mississippi's first state governor, and its center of gravity is Lexington, the county seat, laid out in 1836, three years after the county itself was created. The land here carries a deep Delta Blues heritage, and for a county with so little money, it is rich in that particular currency. Holmes County State Park rounds out the picture, built around two lakes with fishing, camping, and cabins.

3. Sumter County, Alabama - $27,099

Out in Alabama's Black Belt, Sumter County leans on the University of West Alabama in Livingston as its steadiest institution. The county is named for General Thomas Sumter, the Revolutionary War officer nicknamed the Fighting Gamecock. Its financial backbone was the same plantation agriculture that shaped the rest of the region, and the same long decline followed. The Tombigbee River clips the county's northeast corner and opens up room for campgrounds like the Sumter Recreation Area, while the small town of Gainesville keeps a well-preserved stock of antebellum buildings.

4. Lee County, Arkansas - $29,082

Marianna, the seat of Lee County, has the bones of a classic Delta town and a main street with too many darkened storefronts. The county carries the name of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and the Mississippi River runs along its eastern edge, watering generations of farmland. The St. Francis National Forest spreads across its eastern boundary, and a number of sites sit protected on the National Register of Historic Places. If money is short, at least the things worth doing here stay cheap.

5. Owsley County, Kentucky - $29,340

Owsley County sits deep in Kentucky's eastern coalfields, with its courthouse in Booneville. It bears the name of William Owsley, an influential Kentucky judge and governor born in 1782, and coal was the foundation its economy was built on. The collapse of that industry has left hard numbers behind. A widely cited public-health study ranked Owsley among the counties with the steepest increases in cancer deaths in the nation in the decades leading to 2014, and the county also reports some of the highest child-poverty rates in the country. The streams and forest that crisscross the place remain its real wealth.

6. Lee County, Kentucky - $29,817

Every October, Beattyville shuts down its main street to race caterpillars. The Woolly Worm Festival has run for decades, and the racing of woolly worms up lengths of string is treated, locally, as a serious competitive event. Beattyville is the seat of Lee County, and it began life as Taylor's Landing, a ferry stop on the Kentucky River that still threads through the middle of the county. Coal and timber once carried the local economy, and when they faded, little arrived to replace them. The festival, at least, still draws a crowd.

7. McDowell County, West Virginia - $30,127

McDowell County had nearly 100,000 residents in 1950. It now has fewer than 20,000. The whole arc of the place is written in that one statistic, and the cause was coal, once called black gold, which built the county and then walked away from it. Welch, the county seat, took the brunt of the decline, and the fallout shows up today in high rates of drug use and one of the lowest life expectancies in the country. During the Civil War, the area earned the name "the Free State of McDowell," a nod to the relative freedom it offered Black residents. The economic engine that coal once provided has yet to find a modern replacement.

8. Lake County, Tennessee - $34,923

Lake County occupies the far northwest corner of Tennessee, and its defining feature, Reelfoot Lake, was carved out by the violent New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812. Tiptonville, the county seat, sits beside it. The county's history has darker chapters too, including lynchings and the 1908 Reelfoot Lake night riders, vigilantes who terrorized people connected to a land company's attempt to seize private control of the lake and bar locals from fishing it. Today, the shortage of steady employment is what keeps Lake County near the bottom of the income tables.

9. Buffalo County, South Dakota - $38,523

Buffalo County in central South Dakota was named for the herds that once moved across it, and its county seat, Gann Valley, is among the smallest in the United States, home to only a few dozen people. Most of the county, by both land and population, falls within the Crow Creek Indian Reservation, and its poverty traces to that history rather than to the Great Migration that shaped the Southern counties on this list. Cattle and other livestock dominate the landscape. Around 41% of residents live in poverty, and a notable share of households still lack complete plumbing or kitchen facilities, conditions that are rare almost everywhere else in the country.

10. Martin County, Kentucky - $40,826

In April 1964, President Lyndon Johnson sat on a porch in Inez and used Martin County as the backdrop to announce a national War on Poverty. Sixty years later, the county is still on lists like this one. Coal anchored the economy here too, and the population has slipped from a high of 13,925 in 1980 to about 11,000 today, a gentler decline than McDowell's. The county is named for Congressman John Preston Martin, with Inez as its seat. Its grimmest modern chapter came in 2000, when the Martin County coal slurry spill sent roughly 306 million gallons of toxic sludge into the Tug Fork, one of the worst environmental disasters in the history of the Southeast.

Why The Map Looks This Way

Pull back, and the pattern is hard to miss. Nearly all of these counties are what the USDA calls persistent-poverty counties, places where more than a fifth of residents have lived below the poverty line for decades on end. Their hardship is not random, and it is not mainly about individual effort. It was built by particular histories: a Delta and Black Belt economy founded on slavery and never rebuilt, a coal industry that boomed and abandoned the mountains, and reservation lands shaped by dispossession. The roots of that inequality run back through slavery, segregation, and extraction, and the fact that families still feel the consequences suggests the work of repairing it is far from finished.