Goochland County is infused with green: Green leaves, green grass… and lots and lots of green cash.

In fact the rural county’s taxpayers had the highest average income of any county in the United States, a study using the latest available tax data has found.

For the 2007 filing year, the average adjusted gross income reported on 7,782 submitted tax forms was $137,045, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

That is more than 13 times the average in St. Bernard Parish, La., which had the lowest average at $9,959. Even excluding St. Bernard due to the economic devastation there resulting from Hurricane Katrina, the average income in Goochland is nearly eight times that of Jackson County, S.D., which had the second lowest average of $17,655.

The survey looked at the more than 3,100 counties in the United States. 

Goochland rated higher than Teton County, Wyo., where residents have an average income of $126,998. The next three wealthiest localities, according to average adjusted gross income, were Fairfield County, Conn., at $117,425; Falls Church City in Virginia at $116,151; and Marin County, Calif., at $116,094.

The county had the second-highest average gross adjusted income for tax year 2006 at $108,513 and was No. 3 in 2005 at $104,476.

Our state fared well overall—of the 50 richest counties in the U.S., six are in Virginia.

In addition to ranking counties according to overall adjusted gross incomes, the survey included specific categories according to interest income and dividend income.

At $4,491 Goochland stood at 29 in the list of 50 counties with the highest interest income; Denton County in Texas topped that list at $39,035. And at $5,114, Goochland County had the highest dividend income in the state, and the ninth highest in the country, compared to top-rated Teton County at $10,965.

The survey was released by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data-gathering, data-research and data-distribution organization that uses the Freedom of Information Act to collect its information from the IRS, the Justice Department and the U.S. Department of Personnel Management.

But what do the numbers in the survey say about Goochland?

According to Economic Development Director H. Greg Reid, averaging adjusted gross incomes can be an interesting measure of how wealth is concentrated.

But this method may present a skewed picture of how wealth in the county is distributed.

“People have a knee-jerk reaction,” said Reid of the public’s response to the survey. “They think, everybody who is a resident of Goochland County must be really rich!”

Averaging incomes can be misleading, Reid pointed out. In an income survey of a small population, the inclusion of a number of extremely wealthy individuals will push the average up.

“It’s well known that Goochland has a fair amount of wealthy individuals,” said Reid. “But we certainly have residents on the other end of the spectrum as well.”

Virginia’s average adjusted gross income for the same tax year was $64,636, seventh in the nation. The national average was $57,067.

SIDEBAR

Comparing the ways we measure income

Here is an example of how incomes are measured, using samples of reported incomes totaling $7,210,000: $25,000; $35,000; $150,000; $2,000,000; $5,000,000.

Average income, reached by adding sample incomes and dividing by five: $1,442,000.

Median income, reached by listing income that is the exact middle of all samples: $150,000.

Economic Development Director H. Greg Reid says that averaging incomes among small populations may be distorted by the extremely high incomes of the county’s wealthiest individuals. Median household incomes may be a better way of measuring the economic characteristics of a county, he says.

Goochland County’s median household income was $85,639 in 2007, said Reid, which still ranks higher than the national average.