The most distressed counties in America

How the ranking is built

The County Distress Index scores all 3,144 U.S. counties on a 0 to 100 scale using five equal-weighted domains: delinquency, default and legal, debt burden, labor, and safety net and buffer. Each input is ranked against the current county cross-section, then averaged within its domain, then averaged across the five domains. That average is ranked once more against every county, so the score is the share of U.S. counties a county is more distressed than.

Source data: the Urban Institute Debt in America dataset, U.S. Census Bureau SAIPE and ACS, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics LAUS and QCEW, Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts bankruptcy statistics, and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Fair Market Rents. Rank #1 is the most distressed county in the current cross-section. National ranks are shown for the 100 most and 100 least distressed counties; in between, ranks move between updates, so the score says where a county stands. Counties with identical composite scores share a rank, marked T- for tied. Score labels translate the 0 to 100 score into plain-language distress ranges, each covering about a tenth of counties.

Urban Institute data: Breno Braga, Signe-Mary McKernan, Samantha Atherton, and Kassandra Martinchek, "Debt in America," last updated November 20, 2025, https://datacatalog.urban.org/dataset/debt-america-2025. Licensed under ODC-By 1.0. The County Distress Index is American Default Research's own calculation; the Urban Institute does not produce or endorse it.

Full CDI methodology, source list, and update cadence →

More distress rankings

Three more views of household distress, each from its own source. See the most distressed county in every state, bankruptcy filing rates by county from U.S. Courts data, and where the job market is strong and the bills go unpaid.