Red means that the number is significantly worse than the national average, blue means that it is significantly better. Black means it is neither of the above.

Some data is only available on a county level, or defaults have to be used when data is missing for certain municipalities.

Using our own scientific algorithm developed by our statistical team.

Various government and other sources, including the US Census, National Center for Education Statistics, NCEB, EPA, etc.

If you know of a place you already like, start with the “Similar To…” search. If you don’t, start with the “Quick Search”. If you really like incomprehensible numbers, go to the “Advanced Search”!

Our data is as up-to-date as we can make it. We continually update portions of it as new data becomes available. Because certain data may have a longer lag time in reporting, some of it may be older. We gurantee that it's consistent across the nation.

Our listings contain approximately 28,000 cities, towns, and other communities. If your town is not among them, we apologize! Information for certain types of communities may be difficult to find, or there may have been some confusion with similar names. Please let us know of communities which are missing by using our Feedback page. We will do our best to include them.

Once again, we apologize for any incorrect data. We have done our best to accumulate correct information, but if you have found something incorrect, please let us know by using our Feedback page. We will do our best to correct any problems.

We have a number of ways of helping you use our search on your site. You can always include a link to us, of course. We also provide a Web Services API as a paid service. For complete customization, you can subscribe to our service and use the information and searches in any way you wish. For those not wishing to invest in the programming resources need for using an API, we can also provide a customized UI which can be linked into your site. We can customize the look and feel, as well as the kind of search you do. For example, if your website deals with retirement, we could customize a search meant for retirees. Please Contact us for more information.

You can include a link to our site without a fee. We also plan to provide a free “magnet” to our site. Please Contact us for more information.

Our data is not available for any use other than what is specified in our Terms and Conditions. You are welcome to save it for personal use in searching for a community, but you are not allowed to download significant portions of it for any other use without prior written agreement from us. Please Contact us if you wish to purchase our data.

No. Absolutely not. If you do not fill in a profile, default numbers are used.

The profile is used to help us use the right numbers in our city data reports, comparisons, and searches. These numbers are important because they can make a substantial difference in your cost of living figures, due to taxes, mortgages, etc. Your profile is not used for any other purpose. Specifically, we will never save this information on our server and we will never distribute it to anyone else.

No. If we knew what was “bad”…. Different people like different things, and we will not force our judgment on our users. Thus, we do not filter out any communities.

When you specify a radius around a city for your search, we do not, by default, automatically eliminate everything beyond that distance. Instead, we have a gradual cut-off, with cities further away becoming less and less desirable. In the advanced search, you can control exactly how that happens. In the quicker searches, you can increase the weight given the distance factor, in order to make it less likely to be one of the top choices.

We have gathered standardized data both at the state and national level. The school achievement index takes into account how good schools are in a particular state compared to the nation, and how good they are in a particular community compared to the state.

To be consistent, we draw a radius around the community, and find the number of listed libraries, churches, etc., within that radius.

We don’t know for sure. But we’ll help you figure it out.