Rankings · Schools

Highest free lunch eligible by state

Share of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

This measure has no better end. The order describes the states, it does not rank them — see the other direction.

The standard proxy for poverty in a school district: eligibility is set against household income. Read as a description of the students a district serves rather than of the schools themselves. One caveat matters — districts increasingly use community eligibility, which feeds every child free and reports the whole school as eligible, so a high figure can mean a genuinely poor area or a district that opted into universal meals. Shown only where schools covering at least 60% of a county's enrolment reported it, because a share taken from partial reporting describes the reporting schools rather than the county.

  1. 1New Mexico89.4%
  2. 2Nevada87.1%
  3. 3North Carolina76.5%
  4. 4Mississippi73.2%
  5. 5Oregon68.5%
  6. 6Georgia67.9%
  7. 7Louisiana66.1%
  8. 8Arkansas65.3%
  9. 9Oklahoma63.6%
  10. 10California62.9%
  11. 11Texas61.4%
  12. 12Kentucky58.3%
  13. 13New York56.9%
  14. 14Virginia56.9%
  15. 15Pennsylvania55.4%
  16. 16Illinois54.7%
  17. 17Montana54.7%
  18. 18Alabama54.3%
  19. 19Rhode Island54.1%
  20. 20Maryland51.3%
  21. 21Kansas50.4%
  22. 22Michigan49.5%
  23. 23Missouri49.3%
  24. 24Washington48.1%
  25. 25Indiana47.4%
  26. 26Vermont47.3%
  27. 27Florida46.3%
  28. 28Hawaii46.0%
  29. 29Colorado45.8%
  30. 30Maine45.3%
  31. 31Connecticut44.6%
  32. 32New Jersey43.3%
  33. 33Alaska42.9%
  34. 34Wyoming42.7%
  35. 35Iowa41.6%
  36. 36Idaho41.6%
  37. 37Wisconsin40.1%
  38. 38Minnesota40.0%
  39. 39South Dakota38.6%
  40. 40Ohio38.2%
  41. 41Nebraska36.5%
  42. 42North Dakota31.7%
  43. 43Utah29.0%
  44. 44New Hampshire23.7%

Not ranked, because this measure is not published for them: Arizona, District of Columbia, Delaware, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia. Counties where too few schools reported, and those with no public schools.

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Source: NCES Common Core of Data. · How this is built