Every Texas county, shaded by the share of people living below poverty. Darker counties have a higher poverty rate. County borders are the U.S. Census Bureau cartographic boundary (cb_500k).
In a typical Texas county, 14.2 percent of people live below the poverty line, the midpoint among all 254 counties. That county rate is not a state figure. When every Texan is counted once, 13.8 percent are below poverty, a little lower, because large suburban counties sit well below the middle. Dimmit County is 44.8 percent, the highest, and Sterling County is 2.7 percent, the lowest. Eight counties are at 30 percent or more, most of them small and along the border, while 4.0 million people below poverty live mainly in the big metros. Harris, Dallas, Bexar, Hidalgo and Tarrant alone account for nearly half of them.
In short
14.2%typical county ratethe middle county, not a state figure
13.8%of all Texansevery person counted once
44.8%Dimmit Countyhighest poverty rate
4.0Mpeople below povertyall 254 counties added together
8counties at 30% or moremost of them small border counties
The complete ranking, all 254 counties, nothing left out. Dimmit County leads at 44.8 percent, then Zapata at 37.4 and Presidio at 36.3, a stretch of South Texas and border counties. Eight counties are at 30 percent or more. The twenty-fifth county, Camp, is 22.4 percent, and the fiftieth, Nolan, is 18.8 percent. The middle county sits at 14.2 percent. Fifty-nine counties fall below 10 percent, and Sterling is last at 2.7 percent. A county rate is not a state figure.
Every county, ranked by the number of people below poverty rather than the rate. Harris has 749,481, nearly one in five of all Texans below poverty. Dallas, Bexar, Hidalgo and Tarrant follow, and those five counties hold 47 percent of the statewide count. The largest 25 hold 77 percent. Kenedy, with 51 people in the poverty universe, publishes 3. High rates and large counts are not the same map: Dimmit leads the rate ranking with 3,758 people below poverty, while Collin sits near the bottom of the rate ranking with 69,846.
Figure 3
Poverty rate against county size
Poverty universe against poverty rate · one point per row, 254 of 254 plotted
Each point is one Texas county. Poverty rate and county size barely move together: the correlation with the poverty universe is -0.05, so size explains almost none of the pattern. Hidalgo (27.2 percent, 872,043 people) is large and high-poverty. Harris sits at 15.9 percent with 4.71 million people in the universe. Small counties run the full range, from Dimmit at 44.8 percent to Sterling at 2.7 percent. Geography, not size, is what the ranking is showing.
Table 1
All counties
254 rows · 5 columns · sorted by poverty rate, high to low
The full dataset: all 254 counties with poverty rate, people below poverty, people at or above poverty, and the population for whom poverty status is determined, sorted by poverty rate and re-sortable on any column. Use the filter box to jump straight to a county by name. The Census published a figure for every Texas county, so no cells are suppressed. A county rate is not a state figure; averaging the 254 rates would weight Loving County the same as Harris.
Poverty status is determined for most people but not all. The universe leaves out some groups, including people in institutions. The rate is people below poverty divided by that universe from table B17001, not by total population.
A county rate is not a state figure. Averaging the 254 rates would weight Loving County the same as Harris. The 13.8 percent figure counts every person once.
The Census published a figure for every Texas county. No counties were suppressed. The smallest counties, including Loving and Kenedy, have large margins of error, so those rates can move from year to year.
