New county-level data shows five of the state’s ten hardest-hit counties are on the Shore. The state’s own report says $20 an hour won’t cover a single parent’s basic costs in any Maryland county.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Statewide, a nursing assistant working full time, every week of the year, has roughly a coin-flip’s chance of not earning enough to cover rent, food, transportation, and health care. So does a cashier. In the counties where those jobs are most common — several of them on the Eastern Shore — that math is compounded by some of the highest household hardship rates in Maryland.
Statewide, a nursing assistant working full time, every week of the year, has roughly a coin-flip’s chance of not earning enough to cover rent, food, transportation, and health care.
That’s not a guess — it’s the finding of the 2026 State of ALICE in Maryland report, released in June by United Way of Central Maryland and United Ways of Maryland in partnership with the national research group United For ALICE. The report measures ALICE households — Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed — those earning above the federal poverty line but still short of what it actually costs to live in their county.
The topline number has already made news: 39% of Maryland households, nearly 934,000 of them, fell below that survival line in 2024. What hasn’t been reported is the county-by-county breakdown, which doesn’t appear anywhere on United For ALICE’s public website as a readable table — the site’s interactive tool renders it only as an unlabeled, JavaScript-driven map. MDBayNews pulled the underlying data sheet to build it.
What hasn’t been reported is the county-by-county breakdown.
The Eastern Shore problem
Five of the ten Maryland counties with the highest share of financially struggling households are on the Eastern Shore.
Baltimore City leads the state, as expected, with 55% of its 265,998 households below the ALICE Threshold. But the county with the second-highest rate isn’t Prince George’s or Baltimore County — it’s Somerset, at 53%. And the pattern holds: of the ten Maryland counties with the highest share of financially struggling households, five — Somerset, Dorchester, Caroline, Wicomico, and Kent — are on the Eastern Shore.
| County | Households | % Below ALICE Threshold |
|---|---|---|
| Baltimore City | 265,998 | 55% |
| Somerset | 8,348 | 53% |
| Dorchester | 13,546 | 47% |
| Caroline | 12,495 | 47% |
| Baltimore County | 337,395 | 44% |
| Allegany | 27,588 | 43% |
| Wicomico | 41,671 | 43% |
| Prince George’s | 353,909 | 43% |
| Kent | 8,493 | 42% |
| Washington | 60,613 | 40% |
The report itself frames rural and urban hardship as nearly identical statewide — 40% versus 39% — a framing that obscures more than it reveals. The report doesn’t break out which specific counties it classifies as rural vs. urban — that determination is made at the census-tract level, not by whole county — so this data alone can’t confirm how much of the “rural” figure the Shore counties are driving. What is clear from the county table itself: some of the state’s smallest counties are also among its hardest-hit. Somerset has just 8,348 total households, yet its 53% hardship rate is second only to Baltimore City’s — a level of struggle that rarely registers in statewide coverage built around the Baltimore-Washington corridor.
Some of the state’s smallest counties are also among its hardest-hit.
SIDEBAR: The gap can be bigger within a county than between counties
County averages flatten out a variation that’s often sharper at the ZIP code level — sometimes sharper than the gap between the state’s best-off and worst-off counties entirely. Pulling the data sheet’s ZIP-code tab (filtered to ZIP codes with at least 300 households, to avoid noise from small samples) turns up bigger in-county swings than the county table shows:
| County | Lower-hardship ZIP | Higher-hardship ZIP | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Howard | 21738 (Glenwood) — 4% | 20701 (Annapolis Junction) — 67% | 63 points |
| Prince George’s | 20720 (Bowie) — 16% | 20710 (Bladensburg) — 68% | 53 points |
| Montgomery | 20896 (Garrett Park) — 9% | 20903 (Silver Spring/Hillandale) — 57% | 48 points |
| Baltimore County | 21120 (Freeland) — 14% | 21222 (Dundalk) — 61% | 47 points |
| Baltimore City | 21210 (Roland Park) — 28% | 21205 (Broadway/East Baltimore) — 75% | 46 points |
Howard County, one of Maryland’s wealthiest, contains the state’s widest internal hardship gap.
Howard County — Maryland’s wealthiest by median household income (per Census Bureau estimates, roughly $150,000), and the second-lowest-hardship county overall at 29% — actually contains the single widest internal gap of any county in Maryland. Glenwood, a rural, affluent pocket in the county’s west, sits at just 4% below the ALICE Threshold. In Annapolis Junction, near Fort Meade in the county’s east, that figure is 67%. The same pattern holds in Prince George’s, where Bowie’s largely middle-class households sit at 16% while Bladensburg — about 10 miles away, off MD 450 — sits at 68%.
The takeaway: a county’s overall rate — even a comparatively good one — can mask ZIP codes performing as badly as anywhere in the state. The 2026 report itself flags the Montgomery County example (Silver Spring/Hillandale vs. Garrett Park) as a national illustration of this effect; the Howard and Prince George’s examples above are pulled independently from the underlying data sheet and don’t appear in the published report or on United For ALICE’s public site.
A county’s overall rate can mask ZIP codes performing as badly as anywhere in the state.
The wage math doesn’t work, anywhere
A full-time wage of $20 an hour is not enough to cover the survival budget for one adult and one school-age child in any Maryland county — not the cheapest, not the most rural, not one.
The report’s labor force data adds a harder-edged finding: a full-time wage of $20 an hour is not enough to cover the survival budget for one adult and one school-age child in any Maryland county — not the cheapest, not the most rural, not one.
That’s consistent with what the report finds when it breaks hardship down by occupation. Among the state’s 20 most common jobs, several pay wages that leave roughly half their workers below the threshold:
| Occupation | Statewide workers | % below ALICE Threshold | Median hourly wage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Construction Laborers | 36,116 | 56% | $19.52 |
| Cashiers | 48,007 | 50% | $15.62 |
| Nursing Assistants | 32,921 | 50% | $19.52 |
| Cooks | 33,226 | 43% | $17.57 |
| Laborers/Freight/Stock/Material Movers | 35,485 | 42% | $19.52 |
Maryland’s minimum wage rose to $15 an hour in 2024. The data suggests that even wages a third higher than that floor routinely fall short.
A statewide pattern, not a one-year spike
The share of Maryland households below the ALICE Threshold has remained between 37% and 40% for fifteen years.
The share of Maryland households below the ALICE Threshold has held between 37% and 40% every year since 2010, according to the report — meaning the current 39% is not a pandemic hangover or a one-year anomaly, but roughly where the state has sat for a decade and a half. What has moved is the cost side: Maryland’s ALICE Essentials Index — a narrower basket tracking housing, child care, food, transportation, health care, and technology — rose at an annual rate of 5.5% from 2021 to 2024, compared with 2.8% annually from 2007 to 2019, consistently outpacing the broader Consumer Price Index over the same periods.
“Already stretched thin, ALICE families have no cushion for rising gas or utility costs,” said Stephanie Hoopes, the national ALICE director, in a statement accompanying the report’s release, adding that the data is meant to inform policymakers and community leaders working on the issue.
Maryland’s minimum wage rose to $15 an hour. The data suggests that even wages a third higher routinely fall short.
The full data sheet, broken out by county and by ZIP code, is available from United For ALICE at UnitedForALICE.org/Maryland. MDBayNews’s county-level table above reflects 2024 figures, the most recent available.
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