These are the states with the highest number of LGBT residents

In recent years, the number of residents who identify as LGBT has been increasing in the United States. The Williams Institute at UCLA (University of California in Los Angeles) set out to find which states have the most people with this description.

The report was conducted by Andrew R. Flores and Kerith J. Conron, who combined data from 2020 and 2021 to reveal that 5.5% of the country’s population identifies as LGBT, equivalent to 13.9 million adults.

As for popular regions, they found that the Southern U.S. has the largest number of LGBT adults, with 5 million, equivalent to 35.9%, far surpassing the 3.4 million in the West (24.5%) and the 2.9 million in the Midwest (21.1%). Last place went to the Northeast, which only has 2.5 million adults who identify as LGBT, which is 18.5%.

Then, they developed a ranking of states, ordered first according to the number of people identifying as LGBT (number of adults in question) and another that classified the states with the highest proportion of LGBT people (highest percentage of adults in question).

States with the highest number of LGBT residents

California: 1,549,600

Texas: 1,071,300

Florida: 898,000

New York: 853,600

Pennsylvania: 586,500

States with the highest proportion of LGBT residents

Washington DC: 14.3%

Oregon: 7.8%

Delaware: 7.5%

Vermont: 7.4%

New Hampshire: 7.2%

The Williams Institute explained the methodology used to prepare the report, dubbed the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS).

“It is a state-based system of health surveys coordinated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and conducted in partnership with states, the District of Colombia, and three U.S. territories. Every year an anonymous, self-report survey is conducted by telephone with representative samples of non-institutionalized adults who live in each state. In addition to a core questionnaire provided by the CDC, which is available in English and Spanish, states can add optional modules that ask unique sets of questions. One module asks about sexual orientation and transgender identification (referred to as the “SOGI module”) which allows for the classification of respondents as LGBT or not,” they explained.