How we calculate this

Median gross rent, median household income, median home value, and population come from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (ACS) 2024 5-year estimates. The rent figure is what current renters reported paying across 2020 to 2024, not the asking rent on a new listing. When a HUD match exists, the rent tile also shows the HUD 2-bedroom Fair Market Rent from the HUD User API.

Violent and property crime rates come from the FBI Crime Data Explorer for the city police agency, or a contract-policing series when that is the reporting agency. Each index is the city rate divided by the U.S. rate, times 100. An index of 100 is the national average. The overall crime index is the average of the violent and property indexes. The agency name and the reporting years are shown on the page. Most cities use 2024-2025. A city with an older series shows that year instead. If the city agency has no usable series, the page says city crime data is unavailable and does not publish a safety score. It may still show a state-average index, labeled as a state average.

The safety score is calculated from the overall crime index: round(60 minus 70 times the base-10 log of crime index divided by 100), then clamped between 1 and 99. A crime index of 100 produces a score of 60. A lower crime index produces a higher safety score.

Temperature, high, and low come from Open-Meteo for the city's coordinates. The number is a recent forecast window, not a 30-year climate normal. Compare pages show those readings and do not turn them into a comfort score or a winner.

A compare page is published only for a pair of cities in the top 100 of our catalog. Rent, income, and crime rows name a winner from those measured figures. The percent is the gap relative to the higher number for crime and rent, and relative to the lower number for income. Straight-line miles use the two cities' coordinates.

We do not publish Walk Score, transit score, flood zone, property tax rate, homeowners insurance, wildfire risk, air quality, noise level, days on market, or a modeled home-price history. We do not have a per-city source for those fields. School quality is a pointer to GreatSchools.org, not a grade we assign.