State of America

About the State of America Index

The State of America Index — the EvvyTools National Index, or ENI — is the headline number this site asks every day: how is the U.S. economy actually doing? Instead of pointing at one indicator and calling it the answer, the ENI rolls every live tracker on EvvyTools into a single 0–100 score and translates it into a letter grade the way you remember from school: 90+ is an A, 80s an A−/B+, 70s a B, 60s a C, 50s a D, anything below that an F.

Why a composite index

Each individual tracker on this site is honest, but narrow. Mortgage rates near a 23-year high will tell you the housing market is in trouble. The S&P 500 at all-time highs will tell you everything is great. Real wages flat against inflation will tell you neither. The truth is usually all three at once — that is exactly why the index exists. The ENI weights mortgage rates, inflation, jobs, markets, currency, and a dozen other things together so the score reflects the whole picture rather than the latest headline.

The composite approach is not new — the Conference Board has run its Leading Economic Index for decades, and the Atlanta Fed runs GDPNow on a similar logic. What is new is the persona overlay: instead of computing a single “the economy is good or bad” number for the whole country, we compute six grades — one for each of six reader profiles — because the U.S. economy is genuinely two or three different economies stacked on top of one another, and a single grade flattens that distinction.

Why personas matter

A retiree on Social Security and a college senior looking for their first apartment do not experience the same economy. The “Who’s asking” selector at the top of the page swaps the weight each front gets in the average: rates and medical inflation matter more for retirees; tuition, student-loan rates, and the entry-level job market matter more for students; the S&P 500 and credit spreads matter more for investors. The underlying tracker data does not change — only the recipe.

The six personas (Average American, College Student, Home Buyer, Blue-Collar Worker, Investor, Retiree) are not exhaustive — they are intentionally broad archetypes that capture the most distinct experiences of the U.S. economy. If your situation does not fit any of them cleanly, watch the Average American grade alongside whichever persona is closest to your priorities. The full weighting schemes are documented on the methodology page.

How the score is computed

Each tracker is normalized against its own 20-year history — we ask “where is this number relative to where it has historically lived?” rather than comparing across mismatched scales. For trackers where lower is better (unemployment, inflation, mortgage rates), direction is flipped so the percentile maps correctly to the score. Outliers get clipped at the 5th and 95th percentiles so a single ugly month does not peg the whole grade.

Normalized tracker scores are averaged into six economic fronts: Cost of Living, Jobs & Wages, Housing, Borrowing & Saving, Markets & Wealth, and Macro & Fiscal. Each front gets its own 0–100 grade. The headline ENI score is then the weighted average of those six fronts, with weights that change per persona.

What the grade means

A C means the economy is delivering an average decade for that persona — not bad, not great. An A means the persona’s most important fronts are at or near their best 20-year readings. An F means most of those fronts are at or near their worst 20-year readings — the kind of environment that prints during recessions, financial crises, or stagflation. The grades are direction-aware: improvement year-over-year matters as much as the absolute level, which is why the change indicators next to the headline grade matter.

What this is not

The ENI is a methodology, not financial advice. We are not telling you to buy, sell, or hold anything based on the grade. We are telling you what every public, free U.S. economic data feed currently says — distilled to one number — so you can have your own conversation about your own situation with context instead of vibes. The score is also not a recession indicator — though it has historically dropped sharply during recessions (April 2020 hit 38), the index is built for context, not prediction. For the full mathematical detail and the per-persona weighting tables, see the EvvyTools National Index methodology page.