Florida Among Nation's Least Generous States: Study

As the season of giving gets under way, just how much – or little – Floridians give away to help those in need might surprise. A recently released study conducted by WalletHub puts the Sunshine State near the bottom of the barrel when it comes to charitable giving and volunteerism.

WalletHub, the website dedicated to all things personal finance related, recently set out to determine which of the 50 states is the most generous. To create its rankings, the website’s number crunchers looked at 13 different metrics, including number of volunteer hours per capita, percentage of income donated, donations of time and volunteer rate. The 13 categories were broken into two main ranking areas: volunteering and service rank, and charitable giving rank.

See also: Volunteers Provide $184 Billion in Service; How Tampa Bay Stacks Up

Floridians will be happy to know the Sunshine State didn’t rank the lowest out of the 50 states. That dubious honor went to Arizona. Florida came in 44th place just ahead of Montana, Hawaii and Nevada, which ranked 45th, 46th and 47th, respectively. Texas ranked 48th with California coming in just ahead of Arizona in 49th place.

According to WalletHub, Utah is the most generous state in the nation. It ranked first overall and came in first in both major ranking categories. The top five was rounded out by Minnesota, North Dakota, Maryland and Oklahoma.

The disparity between Utah and Florida was most notable in regard to the volunteer rate, WalletHub noted. Utah’s rate is 39.3 percent, which most than doubles Florida’s 18.3 percent volunteer rate.

The study also looked at the generosity of Red States, those that tend to vote Republican, versus Blue States. As it turned out, Red States ranked better than Democrat-voting Blue States, researchers noted.

WalletHub’s findings in regard to volunteerism track with a recently released report issued by the Corporation for National & Community Service. That organization’s Volunteering and Civic Life in America report showed that Florida came in 50th place for volunteerism out of 51 ranked areas. The Tampa Bay area, however, did have a slightly better showing than the state as a whole. It has a volunteer rate of 21.8 percent.

To check out WalletHub’s full report on 2016’s most charitable states, visit its website.

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