This Is the Best State to Live Off the Grid

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 27, 8:30AM EDT

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This Is the Best State to Live Off the Grid — © Chester Leeds / iStock via Getty Images

Not many Americans want to live in the middle of nowhere. Most likely, places that would fall into this category would have few if any utilities; social services like fire, police and emergency services; health care; and high-speed connections to the internet. However, a very few people don’t want to be with other people and would rather be walled off from most of the outside world. It may be tranquil, but it may not be terribly safe.

In LawnStarter’s “2022’s Best States to Live Off the Grid,” researchers looked at 21 metrics across the 50 states. These included population density in rural areas, electricity and waste laws for remote places, phone coverage, road quality, solar and wind power, temperature, access to hospitals and natural and man-made disasters.
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Among the primary conclusions of the study:

Flyover states, it turns out, are indeed an ideal place to land and live off the grid. Nine of our top 10 are fully or partly in the Great Plains region of the U.S. Texas claims the No. 1 spot, while Missouri finishes in 10th place.

Scores could range from 0 to 100.
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Texas is the second-largest state in the United States, based on a population of 29,145,505. However, it ranks 26th in population density. It has several of the largest cities in America, including Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio. It also has a large number of counties with fewer than 10,000 residents. Many of these are hundreds of miles from the big Texas metros.

These are the 20 best states for living off the grid and their overall scores:

Texas (71.85)
North Dakota (65.85)
Wyoming (65.46)
Montana (65.34)
Iowa (65.24)
Kentucky (64.06)
Oklahoma (63.68)
Minnesota (63.68)
New Mexico (62.93)
Missouri (62.24)
Nebraska (62.16)
Arkansas (60.92)
Wisconsin (60.25)
Oregon (59.88)
Washington (59.5)
Idaho (59.36)
Michigan (58.9)
Kansas (58.61)
South Dakota (58.61)
Illinois (58.32)

Click here to see which are America’s 50 best cities to live in.
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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.