Ten of Maine's 24 rural hospitals screen at risk of closing, one in five Maine children is food insecure — the highest rate in New England — and half the state's homes heat with oil heading into a winter the EIA says will cost oil-heated households 21% more.
How to read this page: the class chip on every measure is the honesty label. Counted = an inspection or enumeration record. Modeled = a study's projection or risk score — printed with the modeler's name. Assessed = a structured survey of required investment — needs as documented, not measurements of decay. Figures keep the form their source gave them; years are printed on every measure.
Click any category to expand it — every measure with its figure, what it means in plain language, and its source.
Every measure carries its value, class, geography, year, definition, context and source. Maine's scores run moderate by design: this is a low-congestion state with a comparatively good low-income housing ratio, whose sharpest needs are rural — hospital fragility, maternity-care distances, child food insecurity and an oil-heated housing stock — rather than metropolitan.
Three honesty notes are printed rather than smoothed over. Hospitals: the two standard screens disagree about Maine — CHQPR screens 10 of 24 rural hospitals at risk of closing, while a Chartis-based state financial review found none at risk on its screen (and simultaneously rated Maine's hospitals the financially riskiest in northern New England on FY2023 data). Both are printed, labelled, and never averaged. Traffic: TTI's Urban Mobility Report publishes no Portland, Maine row in its 101-area tables, so the category carries a single statewide FHWA-based measure instead of a borrowed metro number. Dams: condition assessments are unavailable for roughly 70% of Maine's dams in the National Inventory of Dams, so no poor-condition percentage is printed as a measure.
Power is labelled carefully: the heating-oil share (about 50% of homes, the nation's highest) is a Maine figure; the +21% winter expenditure figure is EIA's national projection for heating-oil households, printed because Maine is the state most exposed to it and labelled national on its measure. Broadband uses Maine's BEAD Final Proposal of record (≈24,000 locations, $48M) rather than the lower ≈21,000 figure the Maine Connectivity Authority's president cited in 2026 testimony, because the proposal is the funded plan; the difference is disclosed in the category's fine print.