Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD

Reading the Baltimore Life Score

Baltimore's composite score of 30.5 out of 100 — earning a grade of F — places the metro at rank #385 of 387 in the national file, inside the top 1%. The composite is a weighted roll-up of seven dimensions: Cost of Living (20%), Wages (20%), Rent (15%), Safety (15%), Schools (10%), Childcare (10%) and Environment (10%), each normalized to a 0-100 percentile scale. The strongest inputs are Wages (90/100) and Schools (28/100), which pull the composite upward, while Environment (6/100) and Cost of Living (8/100) drag it downward. Because the weights are fixed, a metro that scores high on the 20%-weighted cost and wage dimensions can absorb mediocre scores elsewhere and still land a high composite — and vice versa.

Under the cost layer, BEA Regional Price Parities read 104.5 for Baltimore — 4.5% above the U.S. average, with rent-specific RPP at 118.2. BLS wage records do not match this metro in the latest OES cycle. HUD's 2-bedroom Fair Market Rent for the metro comes in at $1,857/mo (studios $1,362/mo), the figure that governs housing-choice voucher payment standards and anchors the rent sub-score.

Safety is scored from FBI UCR at the state tier (MD), which reads 425 violent crimes per 100,000 residents and 2074 property crimes per 100,000 — state-level crime always overstates rural-county risk and understates urban-core risk inside a single metro, so the safety score should be read as a regional baseline, not a street-level reading. School quality rolls up from NCES at 14.4:1 statewide student-teacher ratio with 3.5% charter share — a structural signal, not a performance measure. Childcare uses DOL center-based infant cost of $14,631/yr, a line item that can shift a household's real cost-of-living picture more than headline RPP. Environment draws on EPA records including 26 Superfund sites tracked for MD. Compared against ranks #382 through #387 in the table below, Baltimore's position is driven by the dimension weights above — not by any single metric — which is why the radar and sub-scores are worth more attention than the composite.