Harrisburg-Carlisle, PA

Reading the Harrisburg Life Score

Harrisburg's composite score of 43.1 out of 100 — earning a grade of F — places the metro at rank #289 of 387 in the national file, inside the top 25%. 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 (70/100) and Wages (65/100), which pull the composite upward, while Schools (16/100) and Cost of Living (26/100) 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 98.7 for Harrisburg — 1.3% below the U.S. average, with rent-specific RPP at 96.3. 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 $1,493/mo (studios $1,058/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 (PA), which reads 250 violent crimes per 100,000 residents and 1457 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 13.5:1 statewide student-teacher ratio with 6.0% charter share — a structural signal, not a performance measure. Environment draws on EPA records including 127 Superfund sites tracked for PA. Compared against ranks #286 through #292 in the table below, Harrisburg'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.