Data Shows This is the Most Stressed Out City in the State of Idaho

Pressure to perform. Lack of control over the outcome of a situation. An overwhelming amount of responsibilities without enough hours in the day to devote to them. Money woes. Major life changes for you or your family. The list of things that cause you stress can seem infinite at times. But which Idaho city is the MOST stressed? 

For whatever reason, ranking cities is the hot thing to do. If you visit our site frequently you’ve read about everything from the richest small towns, most violent cities and worst small towns to cities with the most expensive home prices, best lake towns and best Christmas towns in Idaho. 

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The latest list we stumbled across aims to rank cities across America by something that everyone is bound to experience at some point - stress. You can try to avoid it, but stress will find a way to creep its way into your life. It can be something small like being stuck in slow traffic or something more serious like finding out you have a serious medical condition, but no health insurance to help you get by. 

Zappia’s list, “Most Stressed City in Each State” was put together using “stressors” that they could find in United States Census Bureau Data: unemployment rates, commute times, home value to income ratios and the percent of a population living without health insurance. Cities were ranked in each category and the higher a city ranked, the more stressed it was considered. 

When the numbers were crunched, they named Caldwell the most stressed city in Idaho. We love Caldwell, so naturally we had questions like “how many Idaho cities were actually considered for this list” and “why did you use outdated data?” 

Zappia never clarified the population cutoff for the cities they examined, so we can’t answer the first question. The second question is a little bit easier to answer. The article used data from the Census Bureau’s “American Community Survey” 5-year estimates for 2013-2017. We’re not sure why they chose that particular survey when the data for 2014-2018 was available before the first time the article was published in October 2020, but census data always lags a few years. If you were to search the Census Bureau’s website yourself, you’d see the most recent data available is for 2017-2021. 

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And that’s what we used to update Zappia’s choice for the most stressed city in Idaho. We pulled the unemployment rates, commute times, home value to income ratios and the percent of the population living without health insurance for 33 Idaho cities with an estimated population of 5,500 or more. The numbers came from the ACS 2017-2021 data set. 

With the new data, it turns out Rathdrum is the most stressed city in Idaho. Here’s how their numbers played out: 

• Unemployment Rate - 5.9% (#9)

• Weekly Hours Worked - 39.7 (#8)

• Commute Time - 24 minutes (#6) 

• Home Value to Income Ratio: 3.58 (#9)

• % of the Population Uninsured: 12.9% (#7)

Other Takeaways

Again, this information was based on ACS Survey Data which we don’t think accurately depicts the current housing market in many areas of the state. We do, however, think that it gives us a cool glimpse at things like the number of hours worked and commute times in different areas of the state. Here’s a closer look at some of the rankings.