About Top City Reports
Helping people make data-driven decisions about where to live.
Our Mission
Choosing where to live is one of the most important decisions a person can make. Top City Reports exists to make that decision easier by providing transparent, government-sourced data on 500+ U.S. cities — covering affordability, safety, educational attainment, weather, and overall livability.
We believe city data should be accessible to everyone, not locked behind paywalls or buried in spreadsheets. Every score on Top City Reports is derived from publicly available government datasets, processed through our proprietary scoring methodology.
What We Cover
- 505 cities across all 50 U.S. states, D.C., and Puerto Rico
- Affordability — median income, rent, and home values from the U.S. Census Bureau ACS
- Safety — violent and property crime rates from the FBI Crime Data Explorer
- Educational Attainment — high school graduation and bachelor's degree rates
- Climate — average temperature, rainfall, and snowfall from NOAA NCEI
- Livability — a composite score weighting all of the above
Data & Methodology
Our proprietary scoring system translates raw government data into 0–100 scores for easy comparison across affordability, educational attainment, safety, weather, and livability categories. See our Data & Methodology page for a full list of metrics and data sources.
Limitations
No dataset is perfect. Census estimates have margins of error. FBI crime data depends on voluntary agency reporting, so coverage varies. Weather data is station-based and may not perfectly represent a city's full area. We encourage users to treat our scores as one input among many when making relocation decisions.