Jason Smith/Getty Images What, you thought your state was special?
- The US is a huge, diverse country, and the characteristics of its states vary widely.
- We calculated how from average each state landed on 38 demographic, social, and economic indicators including marriage, education, and income.
- Business Insider has also ranked states by the most dangerous place to work, pinpointed the most expensive college in every state, and zeroed in on the most exciting - and boring - hometowns in each state.
The US is a huge, diverse country, and the characteristics of the states that make it up vary widely.
We used 38 demographic, social, and economic indicators that cover several aspects of American life, mostly from the US Census Bureau's recently released 2017 American Community Survey estimates.
We looked at how far away each state was from the average of each of those metrics among the states and Washington, DC. Adding those distances together, we found an overall "averageness" score for each state and DC.
Read more: See our method and detailed sources for this ranking
Here's all 50 states and DC, ranked from least to most average, along with some of the metrics for which they were outliers or average.