US Metro Life-Score Statistics

Key findings

Short, attributable one-liners from the same live queries as the charts. Quote with the Cite this page block.

1. This rebuild scores 387 metropolitan areas and 51 states (including the District of Columbia) on the same seven-dimension life-score board.
2. Metro composite scores in this extract run from Bozeman, MT at 26.0 to Wildwood-The Villages, FL at 71.6. The composite is a percentile blend, not an academic grade.
3. 8 of 387 metros sit in the top third on both affordability (cost_score) and wages at once.
4. Across 387 metros, affordability and wages correlate at r = -0.77 (Pearson on cost_score vs wages_score). Cheap metros tend to pay less.
5. On the 51-jurisdiction state board, composites run from California at 33.2 to West Virginia at 67.1.
6. The county table in this rebuild holds 3,224 counties (childcare and rent joins), a different grain from the 387 metro life scores.

By the numbers

51

state jurisdictions

1,920

curated comparison pairs

71.6

highest metro composite

26.0

lowest metro composite

How these totals are computed

Every figure is an aggregate against PlainCompare's local life_scores table. Metro and state boards are separate peer sets. Composite score is a percentile blend of seven dimensions (cost, wages, rent, safety, schools, childcare, environment). Cost_score is inverted so higher means more affordable. No headline total is hand-typed.

The cost-versus-wage overlap count uses the same 66.7 cutoff as the homepage sweet-spot board (top third on both ladders). A missing dimension on a metro drops that dimension from that row; it is not a finding that the place has no schools or no crime. Full source handling lives on the methodology page.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities BEA RPP · HUD FMR · FBI UCR · BLS OEWS · NCES · DOL · EPA · 2026 Figures are current rows in this rebuild, not a moving recommendation.