How Are Our Local Market Grades Calculated?

Our grading system is built on multiple data sets both publicly and privately available. We’ve built our system using the most impactful data points to score each city on a scale that can help our users find the best place to live.

First, we rank every city in the U.S. that has data available for each metric in our system. Next we create groups of these cities from best (A+) to worst (D-). Then we group together similar data points into categories like cost-of-living or lifestyle and create a category grade. Last, we create an overall ranking from a combination of these category scores.

The benefit of this system is it allows our visitors to not only see a total grade, but explore each category’s score as well. We know that no two people are the same and while some might favor great schools or a low cost-of-living, others might prefer a quick commute to work.

Below is a list of each data point we use for our scoring system, which category it lives within, and the source of the data.