Health Outcomes
Diabetes Prevalence by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2023 · Age-adjusted prevalence · All 3,144 US counties
Diagnosed diabetes among adults is the single PLACES measure most closely tracked by CMS, state Medicaid agencies, and the CDC Division of Diabetes Translation. The age-adjusted county estimate counts adults ever told by a healthcare professional they had diabetes — almost all Type 2 in adult populations, with a small share of Type 1. The county pattern closely follows the obesity ranking and the lower-Mississippi-Delta-and-central-Appalachia geography that has shown up in BRFSS data for two decades. High-prevalence counties often have proportionally lower diabetes-care-management uptake, though PLACES does not directly measure HbA1c control.
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 Diabetes Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the lowest reported diabetes prevalence — these counties show the most favorable position on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Diabetes.
Highest Diabetes Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the highest reported diabetes prevalence.
Worst 100 counties for Diabetes.
What this ranking suggests
Diabetes prevalence is one of the most expensive chronic-disease patterns in US healthcare. Read this ranking alongside the OBESITY, LPA (physical inactivity), and FOODINSECU rankings for the same county; the four together describe the metabolic-disease environment more honestly than any one alone.
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: DIABETES.