{"id":218818,"date":"2026-07-30T19:07:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T19:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/new-study-ranks-all-50-states-see-where-yours-landed-usa-today\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T19:07:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T19:07:09","slug":"new-study-ranks-all-50-states-see-where-yours-landed-usa-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/new-study-ranks-all-50-states-see-where-yours-landed-usa-today\/","title":{"rendered":"New study ranks all 50 states. See where yours landed – USA Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new study has ranked each of the 50 states from best to worst.
US News published its 2026 Overall Best State Rankings<\/a> the week of July 27. Each state was analyzed in eight categories: Education, health care, economy, infrastructure, opportunity, fiscal stability, natural environment, and crime and corrections.
This year, the states among the top five best are Utah, South Dakota, Minnesota, North Dakota and Nebraska. As for the bottom of the barrel, Arkansas, Michigan, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alaska and Louisiana ranked the lowest.
Interested in seeing where your state fell on the list? Here’s a look at this year’s rankings.
US News ranked Utah as the best overall state. The state ranked No. 2 for economy and fiscal stability, No. 4 for infrastructure, No. 6 for education, No. 7 for crime and corrections, No. 18 for health care, No. 24 for opportunity and No. 48 for natural environment.
Louisiana ranked No. 50. The state ranked No. 43 for fiscal stability, No. 45 for health care and opportunity, No. 46 for infrastructure and education, No. 49 for economy and natural environment and No. 50 for crime and corrections.
Here’s a closer look at how US News ranked each of the 50 states:
To determine the rankings<\/a>, US News analyzed 71 metrics across eight categories: Education, health care, economy, infrastructure, opportunity, fiscal stability, natural environment, and crime and corrections. Some categories were weighted more than others. For example, health care and education were weighted more than crime and corrections and natural environment. Within the categories, each state was given points out of 100, with the best state given 100 points and the worst given zero.
In addition to these point-based ratings, US News surveyed people across the country on how satisfied they were with their state’s performance in the categories. Between 2018 and 2025, US News surveyed more than 56,000 people across the United States.
Here’s a closer look<\/a> at how the categories were analyzed:
Greta Cross is a national trending reporter at USA TODAY. Story idea? Email her at\u00a0<\/em>gcross@usatoday.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new study has ranked each of the 50 states from best to worst.US News published its 2026 Overall Best State Rankings the week of July 27. Each state was analyzed in eight categories: Education, health care, economy, infrastructure, opportunity, fiscal stability, natural environment, and crime and corrections.This year, the states among the top five […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":218819,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218818\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}