Health Risk Behaviors
Binge Drinking by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2023 · Age-adjusted prevalence · All 3,144 US counties
Binge drinking is defined by the CDC as five or more drinks for men or four or more for women on a single occasion in the past 30 days. PLACES models age-adjusted prevalence from BRFSS self-report. The pattern at the county level is, surprisingly to many readers, inverse to the chronic-disease "belt" geography: the highest binge-drinking prevalence often shows up in college towns, oil-and-gas boom counties, and high-income coastal metros. Self-report likely understates the true level across the board, but the geographic pattern is consistent across years.
How this ranking is built
Source: CDC PLACES 2023 release. Methodology: BRFSS survey responses pooled across years, fitted with a small-area statistical model, age-adjusted to the 2000 US standard population. Confidence intervals (95%) are shown for each county — wider intervals indicate more uncertainty in the modeled estimate, typically driven by smaller populations.
Lowest Binge Drinking Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the lowest reported binge drinking prevalence — these counties show the most favorable position on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Binge Drinking.
Highest Binge Drinking Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the highest reported binge drinking prevalence.
Worst 100 counties for Binge Drinking.
What this ranking suggests
Binge drinking is a behavioral measure, not a clinical one. Counties with high binge rates do not necessarily have proportional rates of alcohol-related disease — that signal lives downstream in CHD, stroke, and cancer prevalence, often with a 10–20-year lag.
Methodology notes & limitations
Estimates are statistical model outputs, not direct measurements. Small counties have wider confidence intervals; treat narrow rank differences in those rows as within-noise. Counties where the underlying population is too small to support modeling are suppressed entirely (about 1% of US counties). All measures are age-adjusted to the 2000 US standard population. The PLACES dataset uses BRFSS self-reported data — self-report introduces known direction-of-bias in some measures (BMI is under-reported; binge drinking is under-reported), but the bias is roughly uniform across counties so ranking comparability is preserved. See the methodology page for full data-pipeline documentation.
Data source: CDC PLACES 2023 release. Measure ID: BINGE.