How the County Distress Index Works

Five Domains

The CDI organizes 19 indicators into five equally weighted domains. Each domain captures a distinct dimension of county-level financial distress.

How the Score Is Calculated

The CDI uses percentile-rank averaging. Each indicator is ranked against all 3,144 counties, then the ranks are averaged within each domain, and the domain scores are averaged into a composite.

1. Rank each indicator. For every indicator, each county's value is converted to a percentile rank against all 3,144 counties. A rank of 80 means the county has a worse value than 80% of counties on that indicator.
2. Invert where necessary. Some indicators are "inverted" because higher raw values mean less distress (e.g., higher homeownership rate, higher wage-to-rent ratio, higher business formation). For these, the percentile is flipped: 100 − percentile.
3. Average within each domain. The indicator percentiles within each domain are averaged equally to produce a domain score (0–100).
4. Average across domains. The five domain scores are averaged equally to produce the composite CDI score (0–100).

By construction, the national median composite score is approximately 50. Half of counties score above, half below. This is a feature of percentile-rank methodology, not a coincidence.

Indicator Direction

Most indicators follow a straightforward rule: higher values mean more distress. But five indicators are inverted because higher values indicate less distress.

Zone Thresholds

CDI scores map to five zones. Because the CDI uses percentile-rank averaging (where 50 is the median by construction), the zone boundaries differ from the ADI's Z-score-based thresholds.

The current distribution: 493 counties Healthy, 1053 Normal, 1100 Elevated, 494 Serious, 4 Crisis. See the county profiles hub for the full distribution chart and interactive map.

Data Sources

All CDI data comes from public sources. No proprietary datasets, no paywalled inputs.

Missing Data and Imputation

Not every county has data for every indicator. Small counties and independent cities sometimes lack coverage in one or more sources. When a county is missing an indicator value, the state median for that indicator is substituted. This is a conservative imputation method. It pulls the county toward the center of its state rather than the national center, preserving geographic patterns without fabricating precision.

Across 3,144 counties and 19 indicators, 1,731 values were imputed via state medians, roughly 2.9% of the full dataset. No county required imputation for more than half its indicators.

How the CDI Differs from the ADI

The CDI and the American Distress Index are separate indexes that answer different questions.

The ADI tells you how bad things are compared to how bad they've been. The CDI tells you where things are worst compared to everywhere else. Both use the same zone names and color system for consistency, but the thresholds are calibrated differently.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often is the CDI updated?

When underlying sources release new data. Census ACS and SAIPE update annually. BLS LAUS updates monthly. Urban Institute's Debt in America updates roughly annually. The CDI composite is recomputed after major source updates, typically once or twice per year.

Why are the domains equally weighted?

The ADI uses PCA-derived weights because it has 80+ quarters of time-series data to identify which factors explain the most variance. County data is cross-sectional, and the statistical basis for saying one domain matters more than another is thin. Equal weighting is transparent and makes no implicit claim about which form of distress is more important.

What does a score of 50 mean?

The national median. By construction of percentile-rank averaging, the median county scores approximately 50. Scores above 50 indicate more distress than the typical American county. Scores below 50 indicate less.

Can I compare CDI scores to ADI scores?

Not directly. A CDI score of 60 and an ADI score of 60 measure different things using different methods. The CDI's 60 means a county is more distressed than ~60% of counties. The ADI's 60 means national distress is moderately above the 2015–2024 baseline. The zone names overlap for consistency, but the numbers are not interchangeable.

How to Cite

If you use the County Distress Index in research, policy analysis, or journalism, please cite as follows.

APA Format

BibTeX

@techreport{cdi_methodology_2026,
  title     = {County Distress Index: Methodology and Scoring},
  author    = {Kilburn, Ross},
  year      = {2026},
  institution = {American Default Research},
  url       = {https://americandefault.org/methodology/cdi/},
  note      = {Percentile-rank averaging across 19 indicators in
               5 equally-weighted domains, covering 3,144 U.S. counties}
}