Ability Chicago Info Blog : 2015 Annual Disability Statistics released

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

2015 Annual Disability Statistics released

The 2015 Disability Statistics Annual Report is a companion volume to the 2015 Annual Disability Statistics Compendium. The Compendium presents many tables of data, including state and national values and trends over time. The Annual Report presents statistics from the 2015 Annual Disability Statistics Compendium tables to address the following types of questions:

How many people with disabilities live in the United States?
What is the disability rate in different age groups?
What is the disability rate for different types of disability?
To what extent are people with disabilities employed?
What are the earnings for people with and without disabilities?
What is the poverty rate for people with and without disability?
Is disability status associated with rates of smoking, obesity, and binge drinking?

The Annual Report highlights state and trend data, and complements the detailed tables available in the Compendium. There is a great deal of variability in disability rates by state and the Annual Report includes maps to highlight this information; each map is related to a specific table from the 2015 Compendium

Unfortunately, the statistics provide a concrete reminder that we still have a lot of work to do.

Here contained in the annual report, the lack of progress people with disabilities have made are based on some key indicators:

Labor Force Participation: There remains a huge gap of more than 40% between the labor force participation of people with disabilities (34.4%) and people without them (75.4%). Some disability groups do better than others with slightly more than one in two people who are deaf or hard of hearing engaged in the labor force, while slightly less than 1 in 4 people with a cognitive disability or an ambulatory disability are.
Median Earnings: People without disabilities have median earnings of $31,324 while people with disabilities have median earnings of only $21,232, nearly 1/3 less.
Poverty: People with disabilities live in poverty at twice the rate of people without them (28.1% vs. 13.3%). And the poverty level ranges greatly based on which state an individual with a disability lives in - from a low of 17.7% to an astounding high of 61.5%.
Health Indicators: 41.1% of people with disabilities are obese compared to only 25.2% of people without disabilities and nearly 1 in 4 people (24.5%) of people with disabilities smoke compared to only 15.3% without disabilities.