Waterloo-Cedar Falls, IA

Reading the Waterloo Life Score

Waterloo's composite score of 71.5 out of 100 — earning a grade of B- — places the metro at rank #2 of 387 in the national file, inside the top 99%. 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 Environment (95/100) and Cost of Living (91/100), which pull the composite upward, while Wages (45/100) and Schools (46/100) 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 87.1 for Waterloo — 12.9% below the U.S. average, with rent-specific RPP at 63.1. 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 $1,051/mo (studios $725/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 (IA), which reads 238 violent crimes per 100,000 residents and 1286 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 15.0:1 statewide student-teacher ratio with 0.3% charter share — a structural signal, not a performance measure. Childcare uses DOL center-based infant cost of $8,306/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 25 Superfund sites tracked for IA. Compared against ranks #1 through #5 in the table below, Waterloo'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.