The 10 Richest Cities in West Virginia for 2024

In this article, we'll look at the top 10 richest cities in West Virginia and explore some of the demographic statistics of each to see if we can find out why they are the richest.

Before we get started, let's talk about how we determine "the richest cities" by explaining how we calculate it.

We use the mean household income for each city, which can be found on the latest American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates. The ACS is an ongoing survey conducted by the US Census Bureau and, because it's updated yearly, is more up-to-date that the Decennial Survey.

The latest year we have ACS data for is 2022.

Using the mean (or average) household income, we only really have two criteria to determine the richest cities:

1. The city must have a population of at least 500 people.
2. The margin of error provided by the Census Bureau for the city must be less than 50% of the mean household income estimate.

Richest Cities in West Virginia

If you're in a rush and just want to see the top 10 cities in West Virginia, here they are, sorted by highest average household income.

The list is long, so you might have to scroll the table to see all of the cities. You can click the links in the table to view more demographic statistics about the city.

Demographic Statistics for the 10 Richest Cities in West Virginia

Now that we've seen the top 10 cities in West Virginia, let's take a look at some of the demographic statistics for each city.

We'll focus on the top 10 richest cities in West Virginia to see if there any similarities or differences between them.

Household Income by Age

In the table below, we can compare the household income by age for each of the cities.

Note than any fields showing as $0 are because the data was not available from the latest ACS.

We can see from the data above that the most common age bracket for the richest cities in West Virginia is 25 to 44, with 60.00% of the top earners falling into this age bracket.

The list below shows all of the top age brackets for the richest cities in West Virginia.

• 60.00% of the richest cities in West Virginia were aged 25 to 44
• 40.00% of the richest cities in West Virginia were aged 45 to 64

Race and Ethnicity

We can also look at the race and ethnicity for the richest cities in West Virginia. To do that, we created averages for each race reported for the city by the ACS survey.

The chart below shows the most common races living in the richest cities in West Virginia:

• 97.28% Black/African American
• 89.31% Native
• 3.18% Asian
• 1.92% Hispanic
• 1.43% Other
• 1.35% White

This shows that the most common race across the richest cities in West Virginia is "Black/African American".

Education Levels

Another interesting demographic to look at would be the education levels of the people living in the richest cities in West Virginia.

Just like we did with the race and ethnicity numbers, we can create averages for each of the education levels the Census Bureau tracks for each city, by summing them and dividing by the number of cities we're comparing.

The chart below shows the most common education level of people living in the richest cities in West Virginia:

• Bachelor's degree
  39.84%
• High school diploma or equivalent
  31.27%
• Master's degree or higher
  18.38%
• Some college or associate's degree
  9.02%
• Less than high school diploma
  1.49%

The data shows that 58.22% of people living in the richest cities in West Virginia have a bachelor's degree or higher.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this article has given you some interesting insights into why the richest cities in West Virginia are so wealthy based on the common demographics between them.

In the future, we will try to add more data to this article and pull out more interesting insights from the information.

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