Where the Men Who Meet Typical Standards Actually Live: A State-by-State Count

Published November 14, 2026. Data: U.S. Census Bureau 2024 American Community Survey and CDC NHANES.

Pick a common checklist: a man aged 30 to 38, single, with a bachelor's degree, earning $75,000 or more, and at least 5'10" tall. How many men in America fit all of it, and does the answer change much depending on where you live?

We counted, using individual records from the 2024 Census survey so that age, status, education and income are kept together instead of multiplied as separate averages. Nationally there are about 21.5 million men aged 30 to 38. About 8.5 million of them (39.4%) are single. About 484,100 men, or 2.3% of all men in the age group, meet every item on the checklist.

The short version

Among states, the share of men meeting all four ranges from about 0.5% (Wyoming) to about 3.3% (California), roughly a 7 to 1 spread.
The District of Columbia is the outlier at 9.1%, about 4 times the national share.
The share who are single varies too: from 47.4% in New Mexico down to 25.0% in Wyoming.

The ten highest shares

Rank	State	Men meeting all four	Share of men 30 to 38
1	District of Columbia	5,600	9.1%
2	California	89,900	3.3%
3	New York	42,100	3.3%
4	Massachusetts	15,100	3.3%
5	New Jersey	19,100	3.2%
6	Colorado	14,100	3.2%
7	Maryland	11,900	3.1%
8	Washington	18,100	3.1%
9	Illinois	22,400	2.8%
10	Virginia	14,700	2.7%

The five lowest shares

Rank	State	Men meeting all four	Share of men 30 to 38
47	Alaska	500	0.8%
48	Mississippi	1,200	0.8%
49	Arkansas	1,300	0.7%
50	West Virginia	500	0.5%
51	Wyoming	200	0.5%

Counts are rounded to the nearest 100. The full ranking of all 50 states and DC is on the state table.

How to read this

Where the raw number of men is large, the share can still be modest: California has the second highest share at 3.3% and also the largest absolute count, about 89,900 men. Small states have wide margins of error, so ranks that are close together should be read as ties, and the bottom of the list is especially uncertain. This analysis counts who is where. It does not explain why, and it says nothing about who is a good partner.

Change the checklist

Every number above comes from one default checklist. The calculator lets you set your own age range, relationship status, education, income and height, and it can zoom in from a state to a city. Try it with your own standards.

Method

Age, relationship status, education, income and state come from individual-level records in the 2024 American Community Survey 1-year Public Use Microdata Sample. Single means not married and not living with a partner. Height comes from measured heights of US men in the CDC's NHANES survey (2015-2018) and is assumed to be unrelated to education and income within each age group, which is the one modeling assumption in these figures.