Daily Maps · September 13, 2026 · Archive
Sunny and cheap: 492 counties in the top third for sunshine with homes under $250,000
Sunny and cheap is not a small club: 492 of the 3,045 counties with both measures sit in the top third of the country for sunshine (USDA Natural Amenities sun score of 0.5 or higher) and have a median home under $250,000. Texas has the most of them (81), then Kansas (79), Georgia (75) and Nebraska (58). The biggest are El Paso County, Texas; Oklahoma County, Oklahoma; Sedgwick County, Kansas (Wichita); and Richland County, South Carolina (Columbia). The coasts and the mountain resorts fall out on price; the upper Midwest and the Northeast fall out on sun.
How to read this map
The map sets 2 ranges on the county data: January Sunshine from 0.50 to 3.00; Median Home Value (county) from $0K to $250K. A county is drawn solid navy when it falls inside every range, dotted when it misses one, and hatched when it reports no figure for one of the measures, so a hatched county is neither a match nor a miss. Recounted today from the county database, 492 of the 3,045 counties with a figure for every range fall inside all of them, and Texas has the most with 81. The count in the title is the count on the day the map ran; the two can differ when a source is refreshed.
The figures are the same ones behind every county page on this site: Census population and household income, Zillow home values, HUD fair market rents, County Health Rankings measures of crime and health, NOAA temperatures and USDA amenity scores, each stored with its publication year and listed below for this map. "Play with this map" opens the live county map with these ranges already set, so you can move a handle and watch the count change; "Make your own" starts from a blank map.
Sources
- USDA Natural Amenities Scale (sun score, z-score)
- Zillow ZHVI 2024 (median home value)
Solid navy marks counties inside every range on this map, dotted counties miss one or all of them, and hatched counties have no figure for that measure. On a heatmap, darker means higher and faded counties fall outside the range.