Dalton, GA

Reading the Dalton Life Score

Dalton's composite score of 56.9 out of 100 — earning a grade of C- — places the metro at rank #96 of 387 in the national file, inside the top 75%. 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 Childcare (96/100) and Rent (92/100), which pull the composite upward, while Environment (22/100) and Wages (24/100) 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 89.8 for Dalton — 10.2% below the U.S. average, with rent-specific RPP at 63.3. 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 $1,009/mo (studios $726/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 (GA), which reads 300 violent crimes per 100,000 residents and 1567 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 14.5:1 statewide student-teacher ratio with 4.2% charter share — a structural signal, not a performance measure. Childcare uses DOL center-based infant cost of $6,591/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 23 Superfund sites tracked for GA. Compared against ranks #93 through #99 in the table below, Dalton'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.