Texas has 254 counties, more than any other state. The highest poverty rate among them belongs to Dimmit County on the border in the southwest, where 44.8 per cent of residents live below the poverty line. The ten counties with the highest rates in the state hold about 46,000 people in poverty between them. That is 1.1 per cent of the 4.1 million Texans below the line, about one in 90. Harris County, which is Houston, holds 757,000 on its own. Ranking counties by rate and counting the people in them describe two different states.
The counties at the top of the rate ranking are small. Dimmit has 8,507 residents. The eight Texas counties where more than 30 per cent of people live in poverty hold about 41,000 between them, 1.0 per cent of the state total. These figures come from the American Community Survey, the Census Bureau's annual household survey, which publishes both a rate and a population for every county in the country. The rate is the figure usually quoted, and with good reason: it is comparable between a county of eight thousand people and a county of four million, and it is the honest way to ask where conditions are hardest.
Counting instead of ranking moves the answer to the cities. Six of the 254 counties hold half of everyone in poverty in Texas.
Those six counties account for 50.2 per cent of Texans in poverty. Take it to 23 counties, and you have three-quarters of them. The remaining 231 counties, including almost every county at the top of the rate table, hold the last quarter.
114 of the 254 counties report a poverty rate below the state figure of 13.8 per cent. Together, those counties hold about 1.2 million people in poverty, 28.9 per cent of the state total. Collin County, north of Dallas, reports 6.3 per cent, one of the lowest rates in Texas and a median household income of $117,588. It also has about 70,000 residents in poverty, more than the ten highest-rate counties put together.
A rate tells you how common poverty is in a place. A count tells you how many people are affected. Rates are published, quotable, and easy to compare, and joining a rate to a population across 254 counties, then doing it again for every other state, was slow work that had to be paid for somewhere. Reaching for the published rate was a sensible response to that cost.
When both numbers are in front of you, the choice of list changes. A service or a campaign scoped to the ten highest-rate counties reaches about one in 90 of the Texans living in poverty. Scoped to the six largest counties, it reaches half of them, and passes over the places where poverty is most widespread. Neither list is wrong, and neither is a substitute for the other. Hidalgo County is the only large county that answers to both, which is a fact worth knowing before a budget is split.
Cambium AI builds synthetic populations from this same public data, so a research, planning, or marketing team can see the rate and the headcount for every county at once, and decide which one the question actually calls for. In Texas, the two point in different directions, and the same is true in most large states.
Data source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates