Health Status
Poor or Fair General Health by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2023 · Age-adjusted prevalence · All 3,144 US counties
This is the single oldest BRFSS question — adults rate their own general health on a five-point scale, and PLACES reports the share answering "fair" or "poor." It is subjective, but four decades of research show it predicts mortality, hospitalization, and healthcare utilization independent of objectively measured disease. The age-adjusted county prevalence is one of the more stable cross-year signals in the dataset. The poorest self-rated health clusters in central Appalachia, the lower Mississippi Delta, and the borderlands counties of South Texas — a geography that does not change much year to year.
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 Fair or Poor General Health Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the lowest reported fair or poor general health prevalence — these counties show the most favorable position on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Fair or Poor General Health.
Highest Fair or Poor General Health Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the highest reported fair or poor general health prevalence.
Worst 100 counties for Fair or Poor General Health.
What this ranking suggests
Self-rated health is the closest thing in PLACES to a "how things are going overall" indicator. It does not replace objective disease prevalence, but it is the cleanest single proxy for the lived experience of health in a county. Read it alongside the disability and chronic-disease rankings on this site for context.
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: GHLTH.