Opportunity Zones · 2018–2027 · designation & investment
Governors designated 8,764 Opportunity Zones in 2018 from a pool of eligible low-income tracts. Qualified funds have reported $112 billion of property in them through tax year 2024. This sets out which eligible tracts were designated, how investment is distributed across zones, and which zones lose eligibility under the 2027 rules.
Iowa
Iowa designated 62 of its 242 eligible low-income tracts. Those tracts had a median poverty rate of 21.3%, against 20.7% for the 181 that were eligible and not designated. Reported investment is $1.3M per zone against $13.3M nationally, and 40% of the zones are not eligible under the 2027 rules.
Nationally, average investment per zone differs by a factor of about 490 between the top and bottom fifth of zones. Tracts that received investment showed higher rates of increase in house values and income before designation than those that did not.
State-level designation and investment measures, the distribution of investment across zones, and pre-designation trends. State-by-state map.
Open the national view →How eligibility was reconstructed and validated, the absence of tract-level investment data, and the limits of the analysis.
Read the methodology →About the figures. Designations come from the CDFI Fund's Opportunity Zone list; tract characteristics from the American Community Survey on 2010-vintage boundaries, the geography the designation is fixed to. Investment figures are administrative Form 8996 data published by the Treasury Office of Tax Analysis (Working Paper 128, June 2026) and exist only at state, tract-type and income-quintile level — no tract-level investment file exists, because it would disclose individual taxpayers. Nothing here is estimated except where explicitly flagged as interpolated across the 2020 census boundary redraw.