The County Health Rankings show us that where we live matters to our health. The health of a community depends on many different factors - ranging from health behaviors, education and jobs, to quality of health care, to the environment.

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Why can’t we compare our counties across the nation as well as within our state?

The purpose of the County Health Rankings is to compare counties within states. We discourage comparisons between states for several reasons:

  • The County Health Rankings is not intended to be a national report that finds the 10 or 15 least healthy counties in the nation and focuses only on that. The Rankings are intended to provide a tool for each state to identify counties where health disparities exist.
  • Our effort is to focus on state-specific county rankings, and we won't actually provide any county rankings across state boundaries.
  • Some of the measures that we use are state-specific and make comparisons across state boundaries difficult.
  • There are existing resources that can be used to compare counties across the nation. One is the Community Health Status Indicators (CHSI) Database which the Human Resource Services Administration (HRSA) put together. The CHSI database is periodically updated and provides a valuable resource for counties that are interested in comparing themselves to peer counties with similar demographics.