Which Florida congressional district has the highest household income? It’s not where you — or Donald Trump — might guess

It’s home to President-elect Donald Trump and his billionaire neighbors in Palm Beach, but Florida’s 22nd Congressional District isn’t among the districts with the highest earnings in the country.

It’s not even close.

About half the nation’s 435 congressional districts have higher median household incomes.

And Florida’s 22nd, which is entirely within Palm Beach County, isn’t even among the top in the state or in South Florida.

The highest median income in South Florida is in the Broward-Palm Beach County 23rd Congressional District, which includes the Atlantic coast from Fort Lauderdale north through Boca Raton and includes upscale Parkland in the west.

The median income in the 23rd District, represented by U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Parkland: $80,179. It’s one of only two in the state where it’s higher than $80,000 a year.

Median income in the 22nd, represented by U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel, D-West Palm Beach, is $73,404.

Besides Palm Beach and West Palm Beach, Frankel’s territory includes much of the Atlantic Coast in the county, south to the Boca Raton-Delray Beach line. It extends west to the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge.

The second-highest median household income — $79,024 — in South Florida is in the Broward County 25th District, represented by U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston.

The numbers

Median income is the figure at which half the households earn more and half earn less. The Census reports that median household income nationally was $80,610 in 2023, a 4% increase from the 2022 estimate of $77,540. In Florida, the median income was $71,711 in 2023, up 5.6% from $67,917 the year before.

The congressional district breakdown was produced and distributed last year by U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, for the 118th Congress. She’s done that for two previous two-year sessions of Congress; the 119th Congress just started. The analysis is based on Census data.

Congressional district boundaries are drawn by state legislatures every 10 years to reflect population changes. They’re often crafted for political reasons, joining communities with the goal of helping the party in control of designing the map and hurting the party that’s not in charge. In some cases, districts are crafted to increase the chance of minority representation based on the federal Voting Rights Act.

The results can bring together higher income communities like Moskowitz’s, or concentrate lower-income communities, as in Florida’s 20th Congressional District.

The Broward-Palm Beach County 20th District, represented by U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Miramar, has a median income of $57,237.

Highest, lowest

The 20th District’s median income is the lowest in South Florida and the 23rd District has the highest.

The northeast Florida 5th District, which takes in parts of Duval and St. Johns counties, has the highest median income in the state, at $84,630.

And the north central 3rd district, which includes the Big Bend, has a median income of $56,286, the lowest in Florida.

Both are represented by Republicans, U.S. Rep. John Rutherford in the 5th and U.S. Rep. Kat Cammack in the 3rd.

Florida’s place

Florida lags the nation, with only one of its congressional districts in the top one-third.

It has 18 districts in the middle third. Another nine from Florida are in the bottom one-third nationally.

Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida, said Florida compared to other states isn’t shocking.

“Florida is known for being a low-income state,” he said. “That’s reflected in these statistics, where our wealthiest district, at $84,630 is only 133rd.”

Nationally, 12 of the 15 districts with the highest median incomes are in California, New Jersey and New York, states known for higher incomes, higher taxes and more government services than states like Florida.

More than half of the 15 with the lowest median incomes are in states with the opposite reputation: West Virginia, Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky and Mississippi.

(The lowest-median income list also includes some districts from the northern states of New York, Ohio and Michigan.)

Party differences

In recent years, higher income voters have become more Democratic and working class voters have become more Republican. Of the 50 districts nationwide with the highest median household income, 37 are represented by Democrats and 13 by Republicans.

The 50 districts with the lowest median incomes are more evenly divided, with 26 represented by Republicans and 24 by Democrats.

Unlike the national picture, there isn’t as clear an association with income level and political party of the representative in Florida — possibly because so many of the state’s congressional districts — 20 out of 28 — are represented by Republicans.

The highest and lowest median income districts are represented by Republicans. And the second highest and second lowest are represented by Democrats.

“It was interesting to me that there didn’t seem to be a huge difference by party. Traditionally, you might have thought middle and upper class was going to be Republican and lower income was going to be Democratic. But that’s not the way it came back,” Jewett said. “You had an ‘R’ and a ‘D’ and an ‘R’ and a ‘D’ in the top four.”

Geography

Geography seems to be a factor. Of the 12 Florida districts that have the highest median household incomes, 11 are along the Atlantic or Gulf coasts.

The one exception is U.S. Rep. Dan Webster’s landlocked central Florida district. But Jewett noted, it includes Sumter County, home to much of The Villages. The retirement megalopolis about an hour northwest of Orlando and an hour south of Gainesville is home to many affluent retirees.

“Almost every district in Florida tends to have some coast. There’s a few that are landlocked. But the districts that are mostly coastal with less inland territory on average do seem to be wealthier,” Jewett said. “That’s not a shock when you think about cost of living and cost of housing. It typically is more expensive to live near the coast and thus you’re going to have weather families on average living there,” he said.

Two of the bottom three (Districts 2 and 3) are in the central part of the Panhandle, and their coastal exposure is around the Big Bend. “The central Panhandle is still relatively poor compared to the rest of the state.”

District 3, the one with the lowest median household income includes Gainesville, home of the University of Florida, that’s not enough to offset the 10 other counties in the sprawling, largely rural district.

Districts 2, 3 and 18 (fourth from the bottom) are geographically the largest in the state. District 18 anchored by Lake Okeechobee on its southeast side has a large agricultural base, Jewett said.

Breakdown by district

Here is where each Florida congressional district ranks out of 435 districts nationwide. Districts that include all or parts of Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties are in bold.

133: John Rutherford, R-5th District, $84,630.

163: Jared Moskowitz, D-23rd District, $80,179.

169: Vern Buchanan, R-16th District, $79,125.

172: Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-25th District, $79,024.

174: Daniel Webster, R-11th District, $78,966.

188: Brian Mast, R-21st District, $76,355.

189: Byron Donalds, R-19th District, $76,223.

195: Cory Mills, R-District 7, $75,437.

196: Maria Elvira Salazar, R-District 27, $75,323.

213: Carlos Gimenez, R-District 28, $73,429.

214: Lois Frankel, D-District 22, $73,404.

216: Mike Haridopolos*, R-District 8, $73,344.

235: Vacant, District 1*, $71,302.

239: Kathy Castor, D-District 14, $70,955.

243: Greg Steube, R-District 17, $70,558.

245: Aaron Bean, R-District 4, $70,226.

255: Darren Soto, D-District 9, $69,493.

273: Laurel Lee, R-District 15, $67,704.

285: Mario Diaz-Balart, R-District 26, $67,071.

300: Anna Paulina Luna, R-District 13, $65,785.

311: Maxwell Frost, D-District 10, $64,575.

363: Frederica Wilson, D-District 24, $60,388.

365: Mike Waltz, R-District 6*, $60,287.

369: Gus Bilirakis, R-District 12, $59,804.

381: Scott Franklin, R-District 18, $57,810.

386: Neal Dunn, R-District 2, $57,516.

389: Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-District 20, $57,237.

396: Kat Cammack, R-District 3, $56,286.

* District 1 was represented by Matt Gaetz, a Panhandle Republican, until he resigned on Nov. 13, 2024, as he unsuccessfully sought to become attorney general in the Trump administration. On Jan. 3, he declined to take office as part of the new Congress that was elected in November. District 6 is represented by U.S. Rep. Mike Waltz, who is expected to resign imminently to become national security adviser in the Trump administration. Special elections have been set to fill both jobs. U.S. Rep. Mike Haridopolos was elected in November, succeeding U.S. Rep. Bill Posey, who retired.

Source: Data compiled in 2024 by the office of U.S. Rep, Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio.

Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.