Some of you may remember my post from last week that visualized the US population living below the poverty line. After the feedbacks, I did some research and decided to extend the map a bit, while basically not doing the same thing again. This time, I factored in the household size and compared what is considered a “living wage” with average income in each state.

Based on 2013 data provided by census.gov, the average household size in the US is 2.63. I gathered the states data from MIT’s “Living Wage Calculator” and created these two maps. Here, I decided to filter the results for a household of 2 adults and 1 child, which should be pretty close to the average.

Two maps present different point of views. For example, it looks like California is a rather expensive state to live in. However, average income mitigates this fact fairly well and we observe that a family of 3 spends 72% of their salary for “living”. This basically means that family will have the other 28% of his/her salary to save/spend at whatever.

I didn’t want to repeat the word “average” too often, nevertheless I had stress that every value is “average”. Live dashboard has different coloring and legend, if this one doesn't appeal to you, you can find it here: http://goo.gl/D9m7Zj

Best Bang for the Buck: Alaska (52%), Wyoming (55%), North Dakota (57%)

Worst Bang for the Buck: Mississippi (92%), Florida (87%), Louisiana (83%)