Ten richest counties in America - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Rebecca Lerner , CONTRIBUTOR, Forbes

image from article

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Here’s one way to follow the money in the United States: look past the Washington Monument and the Capitol to the D.C. suburbs. Half of the richest counties in America are roughly an hour away from the capital.

Virginia’s Loudoun County boasts an eye-popping median household income of $125,900, tops in the nation, according to 2015 Census Bureau estimates, the most recent available. Almost 10,000 Loudoun residents commute to D.C., but the vast majority of residents find plentiful well-paid job opportunities close to home – the top local employers are Dulles Airport, the Department of Homeland Security and the Loudoun County Public Schools.

Loudoun County also houses a large amount of technology companies and data centers — up to 70% of the world’s Internet traffic flows through Loudoun’s data centers each day.

In second place is its Virginia neighbor Falls Church City, a small city encompassing just 2.2 square miles that has previously topped the list of wealthiest counties. The vast majority, 78.8%, of Falls Church adult residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Though technically an independent city, Falls Church is considered by the Census Bureau to be equivalent to a county. It’s a government town: 31.3% of Falls Church residents are employed by Uncle Sam.

***

Gallery
Top richest counties in America

Launch Gallery
10 images

***

Other D.C. suburbs with high earning include Virginia’s Fairfax and Arlington counties and Howard County in Maryland. The long arm of government spending is also fueling high incomes in Los Alamos County, N.M., sixth on the list this year and home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The high median incomes of most of the counties on our list are not due to a wealthy few masking a lower-earning population. In both Falls Church and Colorado's Douglas County, the poverty rate is a scant 4%, compared to the national rate of 13.5%, with most counties on the list falling between 4% and 6%. Only Arlington County, Va., and Santa Clara County, Calif., had higher poverty rates, at 9% and 9.5%, respectively.

While some might expect that older communities would be wealthier, in six of the ten counties, the median age is between 37 and 39, not appreciably different from the national median of 37.8. The oldest county on the list is Hunterdon County, N.J., with a median age of 45, while the youngest is Arlington County, with a median of 33.9. Most of the counties on the list have predominately white residents except for Santa Clara, California, which has 1.06 times more Asian residents than any other race or ethnicity.

We rank the nation’s wealthiest counties by median household income data from the Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates for 2015, the last full year for which data is available.