Helena, MT

Reading the Helena Life Score

Helena's composite score of 34.0 out of 100 — earning a grade of F — places the metro at rank #375 of 387 in the national file, inside the top 3%. 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 Wages (58/100) and Cost of Living (39/100), which pull the composite upward, while Schools (9/100) and Rent (18/100) 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 95.7 for Helena — 4.3% below the U.S. average, with rent-specific RPP at 90.1. 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 $1,748/mo (studios $1,240/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 (MT), which reads 426 violent crimes per 100,000 residents and 1646 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 12.1:1 statewide student-teacher ratio with 0.0% charter share — a structural signal, not a performance measure. Childcare uses DOL center-based infant cost of $11,466/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 19 Superfund sites tracked for MT. Compared against ranks #372 through #378 in the table below, Helena'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.