About SortedLists

SortedLists publishes rankings built entirely from official, openly published statistics, presented as tables you can sort, filter and download.

Why we built it

Government statistics are excellent but hard to browse: the Census Bureau alone publishes tens of thousands of tables. Many “ranked” lists online copy those numbers without saying which survey, which year or how a percentage was calculated. We wanted the opposite: a ranking where the source, the vintage and the formula are on the same page as the number.

How the data is collected

• Official sources only. Our US lists use the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Country lists use the World Bank's World Development Indicators. Each list names its exact table or series.
• Automated, reproducible retrieval. Numbers are downloaded by scripts directly from the publisher's files or API, not typed by hand. If a source changes its table layout, our scripts stop rather than publish something wrong.
• Visible calculations. When we compute a share (for example, the homeownership rate), the methodology section states the numerator and denominator.
• Honest uncertainty. Survey estimates have margins of error. Where the source publishes them, we show them next to the estimate.
• Dated. Every list shows the data vintage and the date we last retrieved it.
• Charts and maps. Charts are drawn from the same table you can download. State maps use U.S. Census Bureau cartographic boundary files (via the open-source us-atlas project, public domain) and shade states by quintile.

Corrections

If you believe a number is wrong, let us know with the page and the figure. We check every report against the original source and correct errors promptly.

Using our data

Our compiled tables are available as CSV downloads on each page and may be reused under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Please credit “SortedLists” with a link to the page, and the original source. US federal statistics are in the public domain; World Bank data is licensed CC BY 4.0 by the World Bank.

Advertising and independence

SortedLists may be supported by advertising and, where clearly relevant, affiliate links. Advertisers have no influence over which lists we publish or how anything is ranked; rankings are determined only by the published data.