Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, NC

Reading the Hickory Life Score

Hickory's composite score of 63.4 out of 100 — earning a grade of C — places the metro at rank #24 of 387 in the national file, inside the top 94%. 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 (94/100) and Cost of Living (83/100), which pull the composite upward, while Wages (22/100) and Environment (39/100) 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 88.5 for Hickory — 11.5% below the U.S. average, with rent-specific RPP at 59.6. 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 $1,095/mo (studios $858/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 (NC), which reads 365 violent crimes per 100,000 residents and 1930 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 16.4:1 statewide student-teacher ratio with 7.6% charter share — a structural signal, not a performance measure. Childcare uses DOL center-based infant cost of $9,487/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 42 Superfund sites tracked for NC. Compared against ranks #21 through #27 in the table below, Hickory'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.