Health Risk Behaviors
Short Sleep Duration by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2022 · Age-adjusted prevalence · 3,143/3,144 reporting counties (100% coverage)
Short sleep is the share of adults reporting fewer than seven hours per 24-hour period — the CDC threshold below which adverse cardiometabolic associations show up consistently in the research literature. PLACES age-adjusts the estimate. Short-sleep prevalence is notably high across the rural South and the urban Northeast, two very different geographies; shift work, commute time, and ambient noise are likely drivers but are not captured in the survey. This is a behavioral indicator, and like all self-report it understates the extremes.
How this ranking is built
Source: CDC PLACES 2022 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 Short Sleep Duration Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the lowest reported short sleep duration prevalence — these counties show the most favorable position on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Short Sleep Duration.
Highest Short Sleep Duration Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the highest reported short sleep duration prevalence.
Worst 100 counties for Short Sleep Duration.
What this ranking suggests
Short sleep is one of the few risk-factor measures the CDC tracks at the county level that is essentially universal — every county has some prevalence. The rankings are most useful for spotting outliers (rural counties with unusually high or low prevalence) rather than as a clinical screening tool.
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 2022 measure year. Measure ID: SLEEP.