Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD

Reading the Philadelphia Life Score

Philadelphia's composite score of 45.4 out of 100 — earning a grade of D — places the metro at rank #268 of 387 in the national file, inside the top 31%. 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 (86/100) and Environment (70/100), which pull the composite upward, while Cost of Living (13/100) and Rent (14/100) 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 102.6 for Philadelphia — 2.6% above the U.S. average, with rent-specific RPP at 113.1. 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 $1,810/mo (studios $1,397/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 #265 through #271 in the table below, Philadelphia'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.