How Iowa's ZIP codes measure up on health

Name: Iowa health by ZIP code — ZipVitals Score rollup
Creator: ZipVitals
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The ZipVitals Score across Iowa — built one ZIP code at a time, then rolled up to the state by resident population.

Data release 2026922 of 933 ZIP codes scored · 3.2M residents represented

Open the full ranking →Download the data (CSV)How the Score works

Score snapshot

54.06Statewide ZipVitals Scorepopulation-weighted average of its ZIP codes

52.34Median scoremiddle of 922 scored ZIPs

68.51Highest score50323 · Urbandale

32.06Lowest score52801 · Davenport

36.45Spreadpoints between highest & lowest ZIP

People & national context

#23State rankof 51 states and equivalents with a computed score

49%Residents in below-average ZIPs1.6M of 3.2M, in ZIPs scoring under the national average (53.48)

0.57MResidents in the top 50 ZIPs18% of the state

0.26MResidents in the bottom 50 ZIPs8% of the state

0ZIPs in the national top 100—

Iowa's ZIP codes, ranked

Highest-scoring

Top 50 of 922

Open the full Iowa ranking →One page, all 922 scored ZIPs — sortable by score, residents, or place

What the distribution shows

Across Iowa’s 933 ZIP codes, the ZipVitals Score spans a wide range. 922 of them carry enough measured coverage across all nine health domains to enter the population-weighted composite above; the rest are held out rather than filled from a coarser geography.

Assembled from the same ZIP-level data as every per-ZIP page. Read the full method →

Where Iowa stands, domain by domain

The ZipVitals Score above combines nine domains of health into one number. This is where Iowa's ZIP codes sit against ZIP codes across the country on each of them, weighted by how many residents live in each one — strongest at the top.

Strongest domain

Disability · 65th

Weighted by residents, this state’s ZIP codes sit around the 65th percentile of US ZIP codes here — its highest of the nine scoring domains.

Weakest domain

Environmental Hazard · 26th

Weighted by residents, this state’s ZIP codes sit around the 26th percentile of US ZIP codes here — its lowest of the nine scoring domains.

Disability65

Mental Health64

Chronic Disease Burden64

Preventive Care62

Social Need / SDOH59

Healthcare Access58

Climate / Disaster Risk48

Risk Behavior42

Environmental Hazard26

Read each bar as a national percentile from 0 to 100. The dark line marks the national median: a bar past it means Iowa's ZIP codes typically place above most ZIP codes in the country on that domain. A domain Iowa cannot place honestly is shown greyed as "Not enough data" rather than given a number.

Each figure is the population-weighted average of this state's ZIP codes' standing on that domain, compared with the ZIP codes measured across all nine scoring domains — not with all US ZIP codes. A ZIP code counts toward a domain only if it carries enough measured data on it and enough of Iowa's residents live in the ZIP codes that do; the rest are held out rather than filled in from a coarser geography. Read the full method →

Why this matters

The ZipVitals Score combines nine domains of health — from chronic disease and preventive care to environmental hazard, social need, and healthcare access — into one 0–100 index for each ZIP code, computed the same way everywhere from public federal and academic data. The Iowa figures on this page are population-weighted rollups of those per-ZIP scores, so they describe Iowa's residents rather than a coarser geography relabeled as the state.

A high score describes favorable documented conditions; it is not a claim about individual residents, and it does not capture everything that shapes a community's health. Where a ZIP code scores low, that pattern reflects structural conditions — investment, environment, and access — far more than the choices of the people who live there.