WhereToThrive

Methodology

How WhereToThrive scores cities, labels source quality, and explains rent, walkability, confidence, and freshness.

What the match score means

WhereToThrive starts with your questionnaire answers across budget, climate, work, community, daily life, family, and practical needs. Each city receives comparable scores for those categories, and the final list ranks cities by how closely they match the answers you supplied.

The score is a screening tool for relocation research. It is not a guarantee that a city will fit every neighborhood, household, job market, school, or housing need.

Source quality labels

Housing cost labels

The primary rent figure shown today is ACS median gross rent. It reflects rents paid by existing renters in the Census ACS sample, including some utility costs. It is not a current asking-rent feed, not a one-bedroom quote, and not a Zillow or apartment-listing index.

Where available, city pages and results also show HUD Fair Market Rent by bedroom count. HUD FMRs are annual gross-rent benchmarks for standard-quality units and housing-assistance programs. The 2-bedroom FMR is useful as a public current-market benchmark, but it is not the same measure as ACS median gross rent and can use HUD FMR areas that subdivide a CBSA.

Walkability label

Walkability is a commute-derived walkability estimate from ACS walking, biking, and transit commute shares, blended with Census Gazetteer CBSA population density where area coverage is available. Some metros fall back to commute-mode data only. It is not official Walk Score data and should be interpreted as a broad signal for transportation behavior, not block-by-block pedestrian quality.

Coverage and source quality

Coverage confidence shows how many required source families are available for a city. Source quality labels show how individual fields are produced: direct, curated, formula, proxy, fallback, or unavailable. A city can have full coverage and still include formula/proxy scores such as walkability, food, nightlife, outdoor, school, or cost index. Food and nightlife now use Census County Business Patterns restaurant and drinking-place density where available; school scoring blends ACS adult educational attainment with NCES public-school access. Curated editorial overrides are labeled at the field level.

Refresh cadence

The public source manifest for this build was generated on 2026-07-05. Each source card lists the source year, collection date, quality label, and refresh cadence. Most government datasets refresh annually or on official release cycles; curated formulas and overrides refresh when the scoring model changes.

Source manifest