Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN

Reading the Chicago Life Score

Chicago's composite score of 40.1 out of 100 — earning a grade of F — places the metro at rank #323 of 387 in the national file, inside the top 17%. 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 (89/100) and Safety (64/100), which pull the composite upward, while Cost of Living (10/100) and Rent (16/100) 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 103.6 for Chicago — 3.6% above the U.S. average, with rent-specific RPP at 112.0. 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 $1,781/mo (studios $1,480/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 (IL), which reads 277 violent crimes per 100,000 residents and 1665 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 14.6:1 statewide student-teacher ratio with 3.5% charter share — a structural signal, not a performance measure. Childcare uses DOL center-based infant cost of $12,257/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 56 Superfund sites tracked for IL. Compared against ranks #320 through #326 in the table below, Chicago'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.