Indiana ranked 30th state in the nation by U.S. News & World report

Every summer, U.S. News & World Report tells Indiana what it already suspects: the state is fine. Not great, not embarrassing, just fine. This year the number is 30th out of 50, up three spots from last year’s 33rd place finish.

But the ranking is an average of eight separate scores, and Indiana’s eight don’t agree with one another. The state is a top-20 performer in opportunity and solidly mid-pack in economy, education and infrastructure. It is also dead last in the country, for the second year running, in natural environment, and it has fallen to 37th in health care, the category U.S. News weights second only to education this year. Averaging those together into a single digit hides more than it explains.

“I’m surprised that we’re ranked 30th,” said State Sen. Ron Alting, a Lafayette Republican in his 28th year in the Senate, noting that Indiana isn’t the only state struggling with health care affordability and access.

U.S. News started as a print newsmagazine in the same era that produced Time and Newsweek, and it stopped regular print publication in 2010. What survived the transition to digital wasn’t the reporting arm so much as the ranking business: Best Colleges, Best Hospitals, Best Cars, and, since 2017, Best States. These lists are the product now. A Best States ranking isn’t a peer-reviewed index. It’s one publication’s weighted formula.

The formula itself is public, which is more than can be said for a lot of rankings that get treated with similar authority. U.S. News scores all 50 states on 71 metrics sorted into eight categories, weighted according to national survey data on what people say matters most in choosing where to live.

This year, education (15.79%) and health care (15.51%) carry the heaviest weight, followed by economy, infrastructure, opportunity, fiscal stability, natural environment and crime and corrections, in that order. Indiana’s placement in the two most heavily weighted categories, No. 22 in education and No. 37 in health care, does a lot to explain its middling overall rank.

Utah finished first overall for a fourth consecutive year, and it did so without leading the country in a single category. Its case rests on consistency: top-10 finishes in five of the eight categories, including No. 2 in both economy and fiscal stability, No. 4 in infrastructure and No. 6 in education. U.S. News called 2026 the “Year of the Midwest,” pointing to South Dakota’s jump from No. 8 to No. 2, Minnesota’s climb to No. 3 and North Dakota’s leap from No. 12 to No. 4, all driven largely by gains in economy, health care and natural environment.

Low costs of living paired with manufacturing investment, U.S. News’ leadership said, are pulling young workers and expanding businesses toward the Midwest and Mountain West. Even Utah isn’t immune to the same weak spot dragging Indiana down. The Beehive State ranked 48th in natural environment, citing air pollution and industrial toxin levels above the national average. The country’s best state and one of its worst have that in common.

Gov. Mike Braun has a cleaner story to tell than the formula does, and he has been telling it. In his January State of the State address, he said Indiana’s real GDP is growing faster than the national rate, and faster than Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky and Michigan by name.

Indiana’s real GDP grew 2.6% between the second quarter of 2024 and the second quarter of 2025, compared with 2.1% nationally, 1.4% in Ohio, 1.3% in Illinois, 0.9% in Kentucky and 0.4% in Michigan, according to an analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis data by Indiana University’s Indiana Business Research Center.

Much of that gap comes from a surge in nondurable goods manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and chemicals chief among them, which grew nearly 12% in Indiana over that period while shrinking or stalling in every neighboring state.

Braun’s office has since pointed to a budget reserve approaching $4 billion, a jump to 12th nationally in the rate of new entrepreneurs, and a rise to sixth in the country for fourth grade reading scores.

It tracks with Indiana’s opportunity and economy numbers, its two strongest categories in the U.S. News data. What it leaves out is health care and natural environment, the two categories where Indiana is losing the most ground, and where the story hasn’t moved in years.

Alting described a doctor shortage he sees firsthand in his own district. He said he thinks most states struggle with the same underlying problem, recruiting doctors to rural areas, and that even Lafayette isn’t immune.

IU Health Arnett and Franciscan Health Lafayette East, he said, draw heavily on physicians who commute in from Chicago rather than live in the community, a shift from what he remembers of an earlier generation of doctors who were, in his words, at neighbors’ fundraisers for nonprofits, not just practicing medicine.

Alting doesn’t sit on the Senate’s health committee, but he said affordability has been a legislative priority for years, and that he doesn’t think hospitals deserve all the blame.

“I think insurance has a lot to do with that,” he said.

Legislative and industry data complicate that account. Hospital prices, not insurance premiums, are the more heavily documented driver of rising health care costs in Indiana. A KFF analysis found private insurance prices for hospital care rose 30% from 2019 to 2026, compared with a 21% increase in Medicare rates over the same period.

The Indiana General Assembly’s own response has reflected that: a 2025 law caps what the state’s largest nonprofit hospital systems can charge employers directly, requiring rates at or below 260% of Medicare by 2029. Lawmakers wrote that bill to target hospitals, not insurers.

The corridor Alting represents is also where the state is spending the most to move its opportunity and economy scores, alongside a similar effort 60 miles south. In Indianapolis and the surrounding counties, the Braun administration has committed $1 billion toward a life sciences and agriculture strategy it expects to generate 100,000 jobs over the next decade, anchored by Eli Lilly’s expansion at the LEAP Innovation and Research District in Lebanon and Elanco’s animal health partnership with Purdue.

In Lafayette, the strategy is semiconductors: Purdue’s research pipeline, Imec and MediaTek’s design work and SK hynix’s HBM packaging investment, aimed at more than 5,000 jobs by 2030.

Alting said he thinks projects like LEAP and the SK hynix build-out will move Indiana’s economy score in a more positive direction, though his reasoning wasn’t really about the ranking at all. It was about retention. Any high-paying job, he said, helps keep young people from leaving the state, and Indiana’s combination of affordable housing and quality of life is what convinces them to stay once those jobs exist.

The same manufacturing growth driving those job numbers is also what’s weighing down natural environment, the category where Indiana has finished last two years running.

“We need to continue to work on the quality of air that’s coming out of our manufacturing. We’re one of the largest manufacturing states in the nation. We got to continue to work on that,” said Altin of the category, natural environment, that has put Indiana last in the country two years running.

None of this is an argument that Indiana’s improvement is fake, or that a three-spot climb doesn’t matter. It’s an argument that the number itself is the least useful part of the story. Alting made a version of that case himself without quite meaning to, defending Indiana’s quality of life in one breath and naming its air quality problem in the next. What matters is which seven categories moved and which one didn’t, and whether the people making the case for Indiana, from the Statehouse to Lafayette, are willing to talk about all eight in the same conversation.