Courtesy of The News& Observer If you’re looking to achieve the American Dream, living in this North Carolina county may be your best shot.
A study done by 24/7 Wall St. used U.S. Census data to find the “richest” counties in each state based on a number of factors, including median household income, according to a release about the study.
You might have a couple guesses which North Carolina county came out on top. Maybe it’s Mecklenburg, the most populous county in the state, or somewhere on the coast that’s home to popular vacation spots.
The study found that Wake County, home to the state’s capital, is where the money is in North Carolina.
The county has a median household income of $76,956, the study found, which is significantly higher than the state’s median household income of $52,413.
Additionally, more than half of adults living in the county have a bachelor’s degree compared to only about 30 percent statewide, the study found.
But the county isn’t full of a bunch of tech gurus driving their expensive cars to their fancy jobs.
It also has a poverty rate of 9.8 percent and an unemployment rate of 3.1 percent, according to the study. To put that in perspective, the statewide poverty rate is 15.4 percent and the unemployment rate is 4 percent.
Researchers used the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2018 American Community Survey to find data on income and education and used October 2019 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to find unemployment rates, according to the study. Only counties with income estimates available were examined.
Mecklenburg and Wake counties are both often in the top when it comes to rankings such as these.
Another study done by 24/7 Wall St. found that the Charlotte area ranked among the top 20 cities adding the most jobs. No Wake County cities made the list.
Triangle cities Raleigh and Durham ranked as Nos. 22 and 46, respectively, in terms of the safest cities in the country, according to another study. Charlotte came in at No. 53.
And Wake came out on top in this study, too.
Mecklenburg County has a median household income of $61,695, according to census data, and has a poverty rate of 13.4 percent.