County Distress Index
How the County Distress Index Works
The CDI scores household financial distress across 3,144 U.S. counties. The current engine is family-v1: five equal-weighted domains, distress-oriented indicator percentiles, published county ranks, and public score labels.
Current Specification
- Coverage
- 3,144 counties and county equivalents
- National average
- 50.0 as of 2026-05-31
- Engine
- family-v1
- Composite
- Mean of five equal-weighted domain scores
- County labels
- National rank, state rank, and score label, not national ADI bands
- Latest build
- 2026-07-28T00:00:00Z
Scoring Rule
Each county indicator is oriented so that a higher value means more household financial distress. The engine then converts each indicator into a Hazen percentile across counties, averages member indicators inside each domain, and averages the five domain scores into the CDI composite.
The composite is a mean of input percentiles. It is not itself a percentile rank. National rank and state rank come from sorting county composite scores against the current county file. Score labels come from the 0-100 composite value.
Five Domains
| Domain | Weight | Member indicators |
|---|---|---|
| Debt Burden (housing basis) | 20.0% | Rent To Income Ratio, Renters 50pct Burdened |
| Default & Legal | 20.0% | Debt In Collections Pct, Filing Rate Per 100k |
| Delinquency | 20.0% | Auto Loan Delinq Pct, Cc Delinq Pct, Subprime Pct |
| Labor | 20.0% | Unemployment Rate |
| Safety Net & Buffer | 20.0% | Child Poverty Rate, Disability Rate, Median Household Income, Poverty Rate, Uninsured Rate |
Ranks and Score Labels
County pages publish national rank, state rank, and a plain-language score label. Rank fifths remain available inside the data for QA, but public county labels should use the score range names below.
What Changed
The retired county engine used fitted factor weights and fixed score buckets. The family-v1 engine uses equal domain weights, national and state ranks, and county score labels without using the national ADI band names.
Composition 2 took effect July 28, 2026. County ranks published before that date used the prior composition. The current composition excludes SNAP participation, EITC claim share, and transfer income share. Those measures describe program reach or the government-response share of income rather than direct household need; they remain available as county data, but they do not enter the CDI score.
Citation
American Default Research. (2026). County Distress Index: Methodology and Scoring. Retrieved from https://americandefault.org/methodology/cdi/