Fort Smith, AR-OK

Reading the Fort Smith Life Score

Fort Smith's composite score of 44.4 out of 100 — earning a grade of F — places the metro at rank #277 of 387 in the national file, inside the top 28%. 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 Rent (98/100) and Cost of Living (96/100), which pull the composite upward, while Wages (2/100) and Safety (5/100) 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 85.9 for Fort Smith — 14.1% below the U.S. average, with rent-specific RPP at 53.4. 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 $937/mo (studios $683/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 (AR), which reads 580 violent crimes per 100,000 residents and 1940 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 13.6:1 statewide student-teacher ratio with 9.6% charter share — a structural signal, not a performance measure. Environment draws on EPA records including 17 Superfund sites tracked for AR. Compared against ranks #274 through #280 in the table below, Fort Smith'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.