Sarasota ranked Florida’s sixth-most charitable county

If you’ve ever felt like folks in the Sarasota area were kinder and more generous than people in other places in Florida, well, as it turns out, you were right. And now there’s statistical methodology to back up that intuition.

A new study from SmartAsset, a financial technology company, places Sarasota County as the sixth-most generous county in Florida based on the percentage of net income that residents donate to charity. Only Collier, Monroe, Martin, Palm Beach and Walton counties outranked Sarasota, according to the study.

The study compared two main factors. "the amount of money people donate as a percentage of their net income, and the proportion of people who made charitable donations." To create its Most Charitable Places index, SmartAsset used tax return information to calculate the net income for Florida’s counties then measured the number of individual tax returns showing charitable donations.

All that math only seems to confirm what many already knew. This place is pretty special indeed.

The top 10 most generous Florida counties, according to SmartAsset, are:

1. Collier County    
2. Monroe County    
3. Martin County    
4. Palm Beach County  
5. Walton County 
6. Sarasota County 
7. St. Johns County 
8. Indian River Count   
9. Nassau County
10. Gadsden County