The 10 Richest Counties in America Will Surprise You

The 10 Richest Counties in America Will Surprise You

The richest counties in America by median income are not located near Silicon Valley or adjacent to Wall Street. They are not in oil rich Texas either.

If you guessed that they are surrounding the D.C. Metro Area, you are correct. Six of ten of the richest counties by median income are based just outside of Washington D.C.: five in Virginia, and one in Maryland. This includes the number one ranked county in all of the United States, Falls Church City in Virginia, which has a median income of $121,250 and where half of homeowners own houses worth more than $500k. In case you are wondering, Falls Church City is less than a 10 mile commute from the nation’s capital.

Two counties that made the top ten richest counties list are in New Jersey: Hunterdon (#6) and Somerset (#10) Counties, respectively. Both are about an hour and change away from Manhattan by car.

Rounding out the list, we go west. Los Alamos County (#3) in New Mexico is 30 miles out of Sante Fe, and Douglas County (#8) in Colorado is on the south side of Denver. Interestingly Los Alamos is home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which gets $2.2 billion of government funding and has 9,000 employees.

Original graphic by: Timothy Sykes