Arkansas ranked as the 49th healthiest state, ahead of only Louisiana, in the latest installment of the United Health Foundation’s annual America’s Health Rankings report.
In the foundation’s 2025 report, released this month, Arkansas moves down one spot after being ranked as the 48th healthiest state in the 2024 report. Arkansas previously was ranked 49th in the 1998, 2013, and 2014 reports. The state’s highest-ever ranking was 40th, its position in the 1993 and 2009 installments of the report.
State summaries distributed with the report analyze 55 distinct measures across five categories of health — health outcomes, clinical care, physical environment, behaviors, and social and economic factors — with the goal of informing and driving actions to build healthier communities. The Arkansas summary shows the state scoring below the national average on 37 of the 55 measures tracked and better than the national average on 14 of the measures. On one measure, the racial disparity of low-birth-weight deliveries, Arkansas ties the national average. The report does not provide a national average for three of the measures, but Arkansas scores among the bottom half of states in each.
The “Key Findings” section of the Arkansas summary highlights four measures that have seen statistically significant changes in recent years, either for better or worse. Among the improved measures is the state’s drug-related death rate, which decreased from 21.7 deaths per 100,000 residents in 2021 to 16.8 deaths per 100,000 residents in 2023, a 23% drop. In 2021, the Arkansas General Assembly approved legislation requiring that the overdose-reversal drug naloxone be prescribed in certain situations to people with prescriptions for high-dose opioids, which an ACHI analysis showed led to a considerable increase in naloxone prescribing. Other policy initiatives contributing to this reduction include the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program for prescribers of opioids, enhanced enforcement efforts, and expanded access to treatment and recovery services. Opioid litigation settlement dollars also provided new funding to support state and local efforts to address the opioid public health emergency that is still ongoing across the nation.
The Arkansas summary also notes that the state’s unemployment rate decreased from 4.7% in 2018 to 3.8% in 2024, a 19% drop.
The summary highlights worsening trends in Arkansas for two important measures. The percentage of adults who reported that they avoided seeking health care due to cost rose from 11.7% in 2021 to 15.3% in 2024, a 31% increase. Also, the percentage of adults who reported receiving a seasonal flu vaccine in the past 12 months decreased from 43.1% in 2022 to 38% in 2024, a 12% drop.
New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont rank as the first, second, and third, respectively, healthiest states in the U.S., while Louisiana (50th), Arkansas (49th), and Mississippi (48th) rank as the states with the most opportunity for improvement.
The America’s Health Rankings website features an interactive tool, Adjust My Rank, that allows users to see how individual measures contribute to a state’s overall position in the report and how changes in specific indicators could influence the state’s ranking.
