Health-Related Social Needs
Loneliness by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2023 · Age-adjusted prevalence · All 3,144 US counties
Loneliness is captured in BRFSS as adults reporting they always or usually feel lonely. The Surgeon General named loneliness a major US public health concern in 2023, and PLACES is the only national dataset publishing county-level estimates. The measure is highly self-report-driven and varies more by individual disposition than most clinical indicators. County-level rankings should be read as broad pattern rather than precise diagnosis — confidence intervals are wider than for the chronic-disease measures.
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 Loneliness Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the lowest reported loneliness prevalence — these counties show the most favorable position on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Loneliness.
Highest Loneliness Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the highest reported loneliness prevalence.
Worst 100 counties for Loneliness.
What this ranking suggests
Loneliness rankings track the EMOTIONSPT (lack of social support) ranking closely. The two are related but distinct: a person can have support available and still feel lonely, or feel connected without dense formal supports. Local programs targeting either pathway tend to move both measures.
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: LONELINESS.