Merced, CA

Reading the Merced Life Score

Merced's composite score of 42.8 out of 100 — earning a grade of F — places the metro at rank #293 of 387 in the national file, inside the top 24%. 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 Schools (93/100) and Wages (75/100), which pull the composite upward, while Childcare (7/100) and Safety (12/100) 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 98.3 for Merced — 1.7% below the U.S. average, with rent-specific RPP at 78.6. 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 $1,503/mo (studios $1,116/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 (CA), which reads 477 violent crimes per 100,000 residents and 1986 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 21.6:1 statewide student-teacher ratio with 12.8% charter share — a structural signal, not a performance measure. Childcare uses DOL center-based infant cost of $17,920/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 116 Superfund sites tracked for CA. Compared against ranks #290 through #296 in the table below, Merced'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.