Disability
Hearing Disability by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2023 · Age-adjusted prevalence · All 3,144 US counties
Hearing disability is captured by a single BRFSS question on whether the respondent is deaf or has serious difficulty hearing. PLACES age-adjusts the estimate; without that adjustment, hearing-loss prevalence would track population age almost mechanically. After adjustment, residual variance reflects occupational exposure (industrial, military, agricultural) and access to hearing aids. The highest prevalence often shows up in counties with histories of mining, manufacturing, or military stationing.
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 Hearing Disability Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the lowest reported hearing disability prevalence — these counties show the most favorable position on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Hearing Disability.
Highest Hearing Disability Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the highest reported hearing disability prevalence.
Worst 100 counties for Hearing Disability.
What this ranking suggests
Hearing loss is one of the most under-treated disability categories in US adults — hearing-aid access has improved in recent years with over-the-counter approvals, but uptake remains low in low-income counties. This ranking is most useful as a flag for counties where local audiology access matters most.
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: HEARING.