About RatioMap

What is RatioMap?

RatioMap shows the gender ratio of never-married young adults in every U.S. city and county. If you're choosing where to live and want to know where single men or single women are more concentrated, this is the dataset.

We compute ratios from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates, updated annually. Unlike other sources that use total population (which is skewed by elderly widows and children), we filter by age and marital status to show ratios that actually reflect the dating-age population.

Data Sources

B12002: Sex by Marital Status by Age
Never-married males and females in 10 age brackets (20-24 through 65-74). This is the primary ratio variable. We sum across the age range you select to compute "males per 100 females" among never-married adults.
B15002: Sex by Educational Attainment
Males and females age 25+ with a bachelor's degree or higher. Shown as the "educated gender ratio" — a complementary lens. No age sub-brackets are available for this variable.
B01003: Total Population
Used for population filters on the rankings page. A city with 500 people and a 200:100 ratio isn't useful — the population filter lets you focus on places large enough to matter.

All data comes from the ACS 5-year estimates, which pool survey responses over 5 years for reliable small-area statistics. The most recent vintage is 2023 (covering 2019-2023).

Why Age Filtering Matters

The all-ages gender ratio of a city is misleading. Women live longer than men, so any place with an older population skews female at the aggregate level — even if 25-34 year olds skew male. Most major U.S. cities actually have more single men than single women in the 25-34 age range, which surprises people who only look at total population ratios.

RatioMap defaults to ages 25-34, but you can select any range from 20-24 to the full 20-74 span.

How Ratios Are Computed

For a given city and age range:

  1. Sum never-married males across the selected age brackets
  2. Sum never-married females across the same brackets
  3. Divide: males / females × 100

A ratio of 110 means 110 single men per 100 single women. A ratio of 85 means 85 single men per 100 single women (i.e., more single women).

Coverage

RatioMap covers every incorporated city, town, village, borough, township, CDP, and county in the United States — over 50,000 places. Small places may have suppressed or zero Census data; these are excluded from rankings but still appear on detail pages when data exists.

Built by BenchmarkUSA

RatioMap is a product of BenchmarkUSA, which tracks financial and demographic data for every local government in the United States.