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Dare To Dream: 2026 American Dream Index

To mark America’s 250th birthday, Newsweek set out to measure the promise at the country’s core — the American Dream — and to map where it is thriving, where it is struggling, and where it is quietly being rewritten in the places you don't expect.

Dare To Dream: 2026 American Dream Index

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The Newsweek American Dream Index scores all 33,772 U.S. ZIP codes from 0 to 100 across six pillars of opportunity — economic mobility, employment quality, education and skills, housing access, new business formation and cost of living — weighted, above all, toward whether ordinary people can still get ahead. While no single number can capture a life, together these scores are intended to start a conversation about where, and how, the promise of America is being kept.

To search your ZIP, compare two towns, and see where every state and county ranks, CLICK HERE

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The American Dream promises that where you start should not decide where you finish. It is a promise about movement — upward, and forward — and it has never been evenly kept.

The Index makes that plain. The places that score highest are not always the richest: they are the ones where a modest paycheck still buys a stable life and a child born with little can still climb. North Dakota, Utah and the farm counties of the Great Plains sit alongside the affluent suburbs of Washington and Denver — while some of the country’s wealthiest cities are dragged down by the sheer cost of living inside them.

That is the honest shape of opportunity at 250: not a straight line of progress, but a map of where the American Dream is thriving, where it is under strain, and where — in Huntsville, in Bentonville, in the Bakken oil towns no one writes about — it is being rebuilt.

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