Des Moines-West Des Moines, IA

Reading the Des Moines Life Score

Des Moines's composite score of 58.7 out of 100 — earning a grade of C- — places the metro at rank #72 of 387 in the national file, inside the top 81%. 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 Safety (73/100) and Wages (70/100), which pull the composite upward, while Environment (24/100) and Schools (45/100) 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 91.7 for Des Moines — 8.3% below the U.S. average, with rent-specific RPP at 84.7. 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 $1,318/mo (studios $1,063/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 (IA), which reads 238 violent crimes per 100,000 residents and 1286 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 15.0:1 statewide student-teacher ratio with 0.3% charter share — a structural signal, not a performance measure. Childcare uses DOL center-based infant cost of $8,306/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 25 Superfund sites tracked for IA. Compared against ranks #69 through #75 in the table below, Des Moines'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.