Ames, IA vs Paducah, KY-IL

Reading the Ames vs Paducah Comparison

Ames (IA) and Paducah (KY) are assembled here from the same federal data pipeline — BEA Regional Price Parities, HUD Fair Market Rents, BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, FBI Uniform Crime Reports, NCES public-school counts, and EPA environmental indicators — so every number on this page is directly comparable. The overall cost index reads 88.8 for Ames against 86.1 for Paducah, a 2.7-point gap on a scale where 100 equals the U.S. average. HUD's 2-bedroom Fair Market Rent — the figure used to set housing-choice voucher payment standards — is $1,026/mo in Ames and $969/mo in Paducah, a $57/mo difference that compounds to $684 over a year.

Wage data is reported by metro delineation, and one of these metros is missing a BLS record for the latest OES cycle; the salary columns below fall back to available years. State-level violent crime, the most reliable geographic tier FBI UCR publishes, is 238.5 per 100,000 residents in IA vs 225.5 in KY, with property-crime rates of 1286.3 and 1397.1 respectively.

Schools are reported at the state tier by NCES: IA lists 1,326 public schools at a 15.0:1 student-teacher ratio, while KY lists 1,395 schools at 15.6:1 — a signal of class-size staffing, though individual district and school-level variation within each state is substantial. Department of Labor center-based infant care runs $8,306/yr in the Ames area versus $7,238/yr in Paducah — a line item that shifts the real cost-of-living picture for households with children under five far more than headline RPP does. When these pieces are read together rather than in isolation, Ames and Paducah are not simply "cheaper" or "more expensive" — they trade across dimensions, and which metro wins depends on whether your household optimizes for rent, wages, schools, childcare, safety, or environment. Treat the tables below as inputs to that trade-off, not as a single ranking.