Disability
Mobility Disability by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2023 · Age-adjusted prevalence · 2,956/3,144 reporting counties (94% coverage)
Mobility disability is captured by a single BRFSS question on serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs. PLACES age-adjusts the estimate. After age adjustment, the county pattern tracks decades of occupational injury, obesity prevalence, arthritis prevalence, and access to physical therapy. The highest-prevalence counties cluster in central Appalachia and the rural South — the same geography that shows up across most chronic-disease rankings, which is not coincidence.
How this ranking is built
Source: CDC PLACES 2023 measure year. 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 Mobility Disability Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the lowest reported mobility disability prevalence — these counties show the most favorable position on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Mobility Disability.
Highest Mobility Disability Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the highest reported mobility disability prevalence.
Worst 100 counties for Mobility Disability.
What this ranking suggests
Mobility is the most concrete of the disability measures: it is what residents experience getting through a day. Read it alongside the ARTHRITIS ranking (a major upstream driver) and the LPA (physical inactivity) ranking (a major downstream consequence).
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. Exact observed/total coverage is reported above. Rows without a reported estimate are excluded for this measure. An absent value may reflect source availability or suppression; the checked-in artifact does not attribute every missing value to one cause. 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.
By HealthByCounty Editorial Team
Page revised
Data source: CDC PLACES 2023 measure year. Measure ID: MOBILITY.