Maine city dwellers are among the most financially sound in America. Huh? | Column
The Agora Grand Event Center, formerly St. Patrick's Church, on Bates Street, dominates the Lewiston skyline. (Russ Dillingham/Staff Photographer)
At this point in Portland’s life as a sought-after place to travel and move, it’s never a surprise for the city to land on some lifestyle list or another. Seeing that it ranked 19th on WalletHub’s 2026 “Happiest Cities in America” hardly seemed noteworthy.
That is, until I saw the metric boosting its score: Portland was ranked third among 182 cities in the category of income and employment, a designation that feels at odds with widespread concerns about the city’s affordability.
Looking further up the list, Burlington, Vermont, was ranked second in the same category — and 11th for overall happiness — leading me to assume this was a reflection of the pandemic-related relocation of remote workers whose salaries come from elsewhere.
Naturally, I wanted to see which city beat out both of them, hoping it would bolster my theory. To do so, I had to scroll all the way down to No. 143 on the happiness list, where I was shocked to find the top financial spot held by another Maine city: Lewiston.
Huh?
The former mill town, where residents recently balked at a revaluation that will raise property taxes and rejected a school budget proposal for being too high, isn’t known as a place to get rich. To find out what gives, I asked WalletHub, the personal finance website behind the list, to send me the data points that went into the cities’ scores. The picture started to become clearer.
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While neither Maine city ranked high in income level, they both had low rates of unemployment or underemployment, as well as bankruptcy, all of which were weighted more heavily than salary itself because of what studies have shown about their relative impact on happiness.
This made more sense in terms of what it might say about Mainers, that we’re a practical lot that works for a living and doesn’t spend beyond our means. Although these don’t seem like the ingredients for happiness necessarily, I could see how they would contribute to its close cousin, contentment.
Both cities also ranked in the top 20 for highly rated job opportunities, measured by the number of listings by four-star companies on Glassdoor.com, relative to the size of the labor force.
A search on that site showed, for Lewiston, several positions at Bates and Bowdoin colleges, while the four-star employers were more varied in the Portland area and included Mainely Tubs, Bill Dodge Auto Group and the town of Cumberland.
In addition, Portland ranked 21st for income growth — also a factor in a previous listing, as a top 10 small city for career opportunities. That designation is particularly misleading if the ranking is the result of remote workers moving in.
There’s evidence in census data that it is. Portland’s median household income rose 33% between 2019 and 2024, to $82,059, about 10 percentage points more than the nation as a whole and than the city’s income increased during the prior five years.
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Before the pandemic, Portland households made less than the national average. Now, they make more. Whoever contributed to that is probably pretty happy about it, though I didn’t see anywhere for the list to factor in the growing bitterness of those who didn’t.
In Lewiston, the median household income was $55,395 in 2024 and had increased from 2019 at about the same rate as the rest of the nation. Despite the lower income level, workers here aren’t getting run ragged, at least; WalletHub ranked the city 13th for weekly work hours.
That, however, might not be making much of a difference in the lives of Lewiston residents. There’s a reason that, even with its high financial score, the city still managed to land in the list’s bottom quartile for overall happiness.
For one data point that you have to imagine carried a lot of weight, it ranked third-highest: the rate of depression.
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Tagged: economy, employment
Leslie Bridgers is a columnist for the Portland Press Herald, writing about Maine culture, customs and the things we notice and wonder about in our everyday lives. Originally from Connecticut, Leslie came. More by Leslie Bridgers
