NJ’s riskiest towns for ticks in 2026 — see where your county ranks

"Watch out for ticks."

I have heard that sentence more times than I can count. My mom said it growing up. My wife says it now, pretty much every time I head for the door in hiking shoes. Friends and listeners who know I like to hike say it constantly, like it is a reflex they cannot help.

And I ignore it completely. Every time.

No spray. No long sleeves. No tucking my pants into my socks like the pamphlets tell you to. If I am in the mood to hike the Pine Barrens, or the woods near our cabin in Pennsylvania, I just go. Last week, on vacation in the Endless Mountains, my wife spent the whole hike getting orbited by deer flies with the occasional direct hit, while I walked five feet away completely untouched. It is the same story with ticks between the two of us. She has had Lyme disease. So has our son. Not me. Not once, not ever, as far as I know.

I do not have a scientific explanation for this. Bugs are strange that way — they seem to have real preferences, and apparently I am just not on the menu. I am not saying that is wise. I am saying it is what has actually happened to me for decades of hiking without a single precaution.

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Photo by Erik Karits on Unsplash

The data says I'm playing with fire

Since I clearly cannot be trusted to warn you properly through personal example, let me hand it off to the actual numbers, because 2026 is shaping up to be a genuinely bad tick year in New Jersey.

A new online tool called TickZone now tracks daily tick risk scores for more than 12,000 towns across 26 states, including 564 towns right here in New Jersey. Scores run from 0 to 100, broken into low, moderate, and high risk categories. According to the tool's data, Hunterdon County has the most serious tick risk in the entire state — the 10 highest-scoring towns anywhere in New Jersey are all in Hunterdon County, each one scoring in the 90s.

Closer to my own home turf, Atlantic County has its own high-risk towns worth knowing about: Weymouth Township, Mullica Township, Hamilton Township, Folsom Borough, and Estell Manor. Every one of those is Pine Barrens country. Every one of those is exactly where I have been hiking carelessly my entire life.

The CDC reported tick-related emergency room visits hit their highest level in a decade this year, with Northeast ER visits for tick bites climbing from 71 per 100,000 trips in April to 187 per 100,000 by June. Lyme disease has now been confirmed in all 21 New Jersey counties, and New Jersey currently has the fourth-highest Lyme disease rate of any state in the country, behind only Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts. The highest concentrations of cases show up in Hunterdon, Morris, Sussex, Monmouth, and Ocean counties.

The blacklegged tick, also called the deer tick, is the one doing most of the damage — it is the only species that transmits Lyme disease, and its nymph stage is roughly the size of a poppy seed, which makes it nearly impossible to spot on your skin until it has already been there a while.

I know I'm the exception, not the rule

My wife and my son are proof that this is not something to shrug off. Both of them have gone through Lyme disease, both caught it the honest way, doing exactly the kind of outdoor activity I do constantly without a second thought.

I am not writing this to recommend my approach. If anything, hearing that both my wife and my son have had Lyme disease while I have somehow walked away clean for decades should probably scare me straight. It has not yet. But if you are heading into the Pine Barrens, the Highlands, or anywhere in Hunterdon County this summer, do the thing I refuse to do. Use the spray. Wear the long sleeves. Check yourself when you get home. The ticks may not have a preference for you the way they apparently do not have one for me, but the smart money says do not find out the hard way.