The Newsweek American Dream Index scores all 33,772 U.S. ZIP codes from 0 to 100 across six pillars of opportunity — economic mobility, employment quality, education and skills, housing access, new business formation and cost of living — weighted, above all, toward whether ordinary people can still get ahead. While no single number can capture a life, together these scores are intended to start a conversation about where, and how, the promise of America is being kept.
To search your ZIP, compare two towns, and see where every state and county ranks, CLICK HERE
Read more:
- Dare to Dream: Search the American Dream Index for your ZIP, state, country and how they compare
- Where the Dream Is most alive — and the places the obituaries forget
- How we did it, and how to use it: Inside the American Dream Index
The American Dream promises that where you start should not decide where you finish. It is a promise about movement — upward, and forward — and it has never been evenly kept.
The Index makes that plain. The places that score highest are not always the richest: they are the ones where a modest paycheck still buys a stable life and a child born with little can still climb. North Dakota, Utah and the farm counties of the Great Plains sit alongside the affluent suburbs of Washington and Denver — while some of the country’s wealthiest cities are dragged down by the sheer cost of living inside them.
That is the honest shape of opportunity at 250: not a straight line of progress, but a map of where the American Dream is thriving, where it is under strain, and where — in Huntsville, in Bentonville, in the Bakken oil towns no one writes about — it is being rebuilt.