State of US Health

Name: State of US Health — ZipVitals Score — 2026-28662750
Creator: ZipVitals
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

68.6 million Americans live in a ZIP code that ranks in the lowest-scoring fifth on three or more of nine health domains.

21.8% of residents, across 7,649 ZIP codes. Measured over the 29,245 US ZIP codes carrying all nine domains · ZipVitals Score, 2026 data release.

Data release 2026

Current release. This page is the permanent citation link for this release — the numbers below never change once published.

Where each burden concentrates

Rank every US ZIP code on one of the nine domains, take the lowest-scoring fifth, and count how many Americans live there. An evenly spread burden would read 20% on every row. The distance from 20% says whether a burden lands where people are dense or where they are sparse — it measures concentration, not severity.

Share of US residents living in the lowest-scoring fifth of ZIP codes, by domain — ordered most concentrated to least.
Domain	Share of residents	ZIP codes in that fifth
Environmental Hazard	35.9%120,987,221 residents	6,511 of 32,553
Preventive Care	27.6%92,206,801 residents	6,394 of 31,966
Climate / Disaster Risk	25.1%84,032,525 residents	6,450 of 32,250
Risk Behavior	15.8%52,868,825 residents	6,394 of 31,966
Mental Health	15.3%48,357,551 residents	5,898 of 29,488
Social Need / SDOH	15.2%51,376,015 residents	6,511 of 32,553
Disability	13.3%42,142,626 residents	5,898 of 29,488
Chronic Disease Burden	7.7%25,671,325 residents	6,393 of 31,964
Healthcare Access	2.8%9,411,780 residents	6,511 of 32,553
Overall ZipVitals Score	12.8%42,666,714 residents	6,394 of 31,966

0%20% — even spread40%

These describe documented conditions across places, never the people who live in them. Where a burden concentrates, that pattern reflects structural conditions — investment, environment, and access — far more than the choices of residents, and it is not a ranking of where anyone should or should not live.

And they stack in the same places

Almost nowhere carries one burden alone. Counting how many of the nine domains a ZIP code falls in the lowest-scoring fifth on:

How many of the nine domains a resident’s ZIP code falls in the lowest-scoring fifth on.
Domains in the lowest fifth	Share of residents	ZIP codes
None of the nine	28.0%88,246,014 residents	8,035 ZIP codes
One domain	33.1%104,241,857 residents	8,746 ZIP codes
Two domains	17.2%54,104,396 residents	4,815 ZIP codes
Three domains	9.0%28,433,508 residents	2,798 ZIP codes
Four domains	5.6%17,510,167 residents	1,996 ZIP codes
5 or more	7.2%22,635,494 residents	2,855 ZIP codes

The rows from three domains down are the residents in the headline above. Measured over the 29,245 ZIP codes carrying all nine domains — 315,171,436 residents — so every ZIP code had an equal chance of appearing in each fifth. No US ZIP code falls in the lowest fifth on all nine.

How the country is distributed

The national ZipVitals Score is 53.06 — the population-weighted rollup of every scored US ZIP code. Behind that single figure:

US residents by the ZipVitals Score of the ZIP code they live in.
Score band	Share of residents	ZIP codes
Below 30	1.9%6,279,244 residents	1,292 ZIP codes
30 to 40	8.4%27,944,138 residents	3,995 ZIP codes
40 to 50	26.4%88,290,207 residents	10,480 ZIP codes
50 to 60	36.7%122,610,887 residents	11,344 ZIP codes
60 to 70	23.2%77,493,696 residents	4,261 ZIP codes
70 and above	3.4%11,211,848 residents	594 ZIP codes

34,223,382 Americans — 10.3% — live in a ZIP code scoring below 40.

The median US ZIP code scores 50.16; the median American lives in a ZIP code scoring 53.58 — population concentrates in higher-scoring places.

What this release covers

333,830,020Residents representedEvery ZIP code weighted by its own population

31,966ZIP codes in the rollupof 32,940 members · 32,066 carry a ZipVitals Score

73.4%Measured on all nine domains24,186 ZIP codes at full coverage

ZIP codes below the measurement threshold are held out, never filled in from a county or state figure.

A baseline, not a trend

Inaugural release. This is the first published State of US Health. A single release is a baseline: it cannot tell you whether a place is improving or declining. Change against a prior release — and the ZIP codes that moved most — appears from the next release onward.

The ruler will not move under you. If the method is revised in a future release, we restate the prior year on the new method, so any year-over-year comparison stays like-for-like. A change in the ruler is never shown as a change in the country.

Why this matters

National health statistics are almost always published at the state or county level, which averages away the differences that matter most to the person asking. This page keeps the ZIP code as the unit — nine domains, scored the same way everywhere from public federal and academic data — and weights every ZIP code by its resident population, so a national figure is built from the places people actually live rather than from a coarser geography relabeled as the nation.

Full methodology →Download the data (CSV)

Population weights: Census American Community Survey 5-year estimates, 2020–2024 release — the current release. Per-source release years are listed on the methodology page.