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, and published county ranks with fifth wording.
Current Specification
- Coverage
- 3,144 counties and county equivalents
- Engine
- family-v1
- Composite
- Mean of five equal-weighted domain scores
- County labels
- National rank and distress fifth, not national ADI bands
- Latest build
- 2026-06-14T15:28:44Z
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. Rank and fifth language comes from sorting county composite scores against the current national county file.
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, Eitc Pct Of Returns, Median Household Income, Poverty Rate, Snap Rate, Transfer Income Pct, Uninsured Rate |
Ranks and Fifths
County pages publish national rank, state rank, and fifth labels. The fifth labels are rank buckets, with band five representing the most distressed fifth and band one representing the least distressed fifth.
What Changed
The retired county engine used fitted factor weights and fixed score buckets. The family-v1 engine uses equal domain weights and self-anchoring fifth labels, matching the SDI/CDI geography contract without using the national ADI band names.
Citation
American Default Research. (2026). County Distress Index: Methodology and Scoring. Retrieved from https://americandefault.org/methodology/cdi/