Rankings · Schools

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

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