This Is the Least Drunk County in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 20, 8:30AM EDT

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This Is the Least Drunk County in America — © Sean Pavone / iStock via Getty Images

The negative effects of being drunk make up a long list. The brain can be permanently damaged. Some cancers have been linked to drinking. Heavy drinking also can cause anxiety and depression Drunk driving is a major cause of traffic fatalities.

Drunkenness varies substantially from state to state and city to city. The states with the worst drinking problems tend to be in the Upper Midwest and the Plains States. Another geographic measure of drinking is by county, and the spread among them based on a percentage basis is very different nationwide.

Using data from County Health Rankings & Roadmaps (CHR), a joint program between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, 24/7 Wall St. has identified the U.S. county with the lowest excessive drinking rate.

Counties are ranked on the share of adults who either binge drink or drink heavily. The CHR defines binge drinking as the consumption of more than four drinks in a single occasion for women and more than five drinks for men, while heavy drinking is defined as more than one drink a day on average for women and more than two drinks a day for men. In every county on this list, fewer than 12.5% of adults drink excessively, while nationwide, more than 19% do.
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The vast majority of counties with low drinking rates are located in just two states: Mississippi and Utah. The least drunk county in America is Utah County, Utah. Here are the details:

Adults binge or heavy drinking: 6.5%
Driving deaths involving alcohol: 16.8% (648th lowest of all counties)
Median household income: $74,665 (229th highest)
Adults reporting poor or fair health: 13.2% (190th lowest).

Of the 3,220 counties or county-equivalents in America, 3,142 had boundaries that fell within one of the 50 states or the District of Columbia. Counties with a 2019 five-year population estimate from the U.S. Census Bureau of less than 1,000 were excluded.

The remaining 3,106 places were ranked based on the excessive drinking rate. Additional information on the share of driving deaths with alcohol involvement and the share of adults who report fair or poor health are also from the 2021 CHR. Note that while the CHR report is from 2021, excessive drinking rate figures published in the report are from 2018. Median household income data are five-year estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey.

Click here to see all 50 of the least drunk counties in America.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.