Even within Ohio, there can be notable variation in poverty trends at the local level. Changes in employment opportunities, educational options, and other factors can be indicators that poverty is becoming more of a concern in a county. In an effort to address this, the Ohio Well-Being Dashboard was developed with the goal of using county-level indicators to determine whether concerning trends are taking place in the counties in Ohio.

This approach examines four socioeconomic and poverty indicators, and how a given county is performing in relation to the state as a whole and the county’s performance in the previous year. The four indicators represent major areas that reflect social and economic well-being that are tracked yearly at the county level and include:
• Poverty rate
• Unemployment rate
• Percentage of students receiving Free and Reduced-Price Lunches from schools
• Four-year high school graduation rates

These measures were chosen because they each gauge a slightly different aspect of a county’s economic health, with graduation rates and unemployment rates likely to be early indicators of socioeconomic troubles. The four components factor into the county’s score equally and reflect two means of comparison: how the county’s data compares to that of the state average, and how the county’s change from the previous year compares to the state’s change from the previous year. Each “point” awarded to a county indicates that they performed notably worse in the comparison.

The dashboard below includes data from the 2021 Well-Being Dashboard. For the lasted levels, view pages 4-5 of the 2025 State of Poverty in Ohio Report.