North Dakota was the great ex­cep­tion to the Great Re­ces­sion.

The only area in the coun­try that saw both a wide­spread sig­ni­fic­ant in­crease in house­hold in­comes and a sig­ni­fic­ant de­crease in poverty rates over the past five years was North Dakota, spe­cific­ally West­ern North Dakota, ac­cord­ing to 2012 data the U.S. Census Bur­eau re­leased and mapped out on Thursday.

Me­di­an house­hold in­comes in more than half the counties in the state, in­clud­ing most on the west­ern side, where oil pro­duc­tion is boom­ing, are high­er today than be­fore the re­ces­sion began in 2007, and they’re also high­er in ob­ject­ive mon­et­ary terms than most of the rest of the coun­try. House­hold in­comes are also up in South Dakota. West­ern North Dakota’s oil patch is one of the few places that not only weathered the Great Re­ces­sion, but thrived. See the full ver­sion of this map.

Over the past five years, since 2007, 62 per­cent of all counties in North Dakota saw in­creases in their me­di­an house­hold in­comes, and 33 per­cent in South Dakota saw in­creases.

“One could say that these two states rep­res­en­ted nearly 50 per­cent of all counties which showed a stat­ist­ic­ally sig­ni­fic­ant in­crease in me­di­an house­hold in­come,” the bur­eau finds.

By con­trast, of the oth­er 3,000-plus counties na­tion­wide, just 56 had a sim­il­ar “stat­ist­ic­ally sig­ni­fic­ant in­crease” in house­hold in­comes. Of all the counties that had a sig­ni­fic­ant change in in­come levels, 89 per­cent saw de­clines.

West­ern North Dakota is one of the few areas out­side of the North­east and Mid-At­lantic re­gions that has counties with house­hold in­comes above the na­tion­al av­er­age, which was $51,371 in 2012. West­ern North Dakota was also one of the few areas where the poverty rate de­creased over the past five years, to be well be­low the na­tion­al av­er­age of 15.9 per­cent.

The Census Bur­eau doesn’t say what is caus­ing North Dakota to stand out as it clearly does in its maps. But the oil boom that’s taken over the west­ern part of the state — and is hav­ing ripple ef­fects throughout the re­gion and the rest of the U.S. — is in­dis­put­ably a huge eco­nom­ic driver.