Fort Wayne, IN

Reading the Fort Wayne Life Score

Fort Wayne's composite score of 52.1 out of 100 — earning a grade of D — places the metro at rank #170 of 387 in the national file, inside the top 56%. 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 (78/100) and Cost of Living (59/100), which pull the composite upward, while Environment (32/100) and Wages (35/100) 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 92.6 for Fort Wayne — 7.4% below the U.S. average, with rent-specific RPP at 72.3. 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 $1,113/mo (studios $892/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 (IN), which reads 308 violent crimes per 100,000 residents and 1321 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 16.1:1 statewide student-teacher ratio with 6.5% charter share — a structural signal, not a performance measure. Environment draws on EPA records including 53 Superfund sites tracked for IN. Compared against ranks #167 through #173 in the table below, Fort Wayne'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.