Visualization: Personal Income by County

Personal income and other variables by county in an interactive visualization.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis, an agency of the United States Department of Commerce, has released personal income data for counties and the states. I’ve gathered this data and present it in an interactive visualization.

As part of preparing the visualization, I calculated the percent change from the prior year for each county. Also, I calculated the difference in the percent change for each county and the nation. This lets us see that while a county may have grown in terms of personal income, how does the growth compare with the nation as a whole?

For some charts I created a filter based on the county population in 2020. This lets you, for example, look at only counties over (or under) a certain population.

BEA offers these definitions:

Personal income is the income received by, or on behalf of, all persons from all sources: from participation as laborers in production, from owning a home or business, from the ownership of financial assets, and from government and business in the form of transfers. It includes income from domestic sources as well as the rest of world. It does not include realized or unrealized capital gains or losses. Personal income is measured before the deduction of personal income taxes and other personal taxes and is reported in current dollars (no adjustment is made for price changes).

Per capita personal income is calculated as the total personal income of the residents of a given area divided by the population of the area. In computing per capita personal income, BEA uses Census Bureau midyear population estimates.

This data is not adjusted for the effects of inflation.

Click here to access the visualization.

For more visualizations, click here.

Example from the visualization. Click for larger.