Disability
Self-care Disability by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2023 · Age-adjusted prevalence · All 3,144 US counties
Self-care disability captures adults reporting serious difficulty dressing or bathing — the most severe of the BRFSS disability questions in terms of daily-life impact. PLACES age-adjusts the estimate. Prevalence is much lower than other disability categories but identifies the population most dependent on caregivers and home-health services. Counties with high prevalence carry a heavy informal-caregiving burden that does not show up anywhere in standard health-system data.
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 Self-care Disability Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the lowest reported self-care disability prevalence — these counties show the most favorable position on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Self-care Disability.
Highest Self-care Disability Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the highest reported self-care disability prevalence.
Worst 100 counties for Self-care Disability.
What this ranking suggests
Self-care disability is the smallest disability cohort by count but the largest by per-person daily-care cost. The ranking is most useful at the local level for adult services and Medicaid HCBS planning. Counties at the top of this ranking are where the gap between formal-care supply and need is widest.
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: SELFCARE.