These Bay Area counties have the highest income inequality in the state – San Francisco Chronicle

These Bay Area counties have the highest income inequality in the state  San Francisco Chronicle

Bay Area counties have the highest inequality rates in California, according to new U.S. census data. The U.S. census uses a summary statistic called the Gini index to measure income inequality within different geographic regions. The number ranges from zero to one, zero meaning that everyone has exactly the same income and one meaning that one person has all the income. In 2025, Marin County had the highest Gini index of any California county for which data was available, with a Gini index of 0.56. San Francisco and San Mateo counties followed, with indexes of 0.53 and 0.5, respectively. { "__type": "devHubFreeformEmbed", "__id": "Datawrapper", "__fallbackImage": "https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/cyuPj/mobile.png", "__data": { "datawrapper_id": "cyuPj" } } Statewide, the Gini index was 0.49, which means that the Bay Area counties were the only ones in the state to have higher wealth inequality locally than the state as a whole.

The Gini index for the entire U.S. was 0.48. In fact, Marin’s Gini index was higher than every county in the U.S. except for New York. The Bay Area, which is home to some of the highest shares of high-income earners in the country, has long struggled with income inequality. Over the last couple of decades in particular, the tech industry has brought very high paying jobs for a relatively small subset of residents, and the