All Countries
How We Build
Every City Profile
The exact sources, formulas, update schedule and limitations behind the numbers on UrbFact. If it is on a city page, this is where it comes from.
From raw data to a 1 to 10 score
Each city gets six category scores (Economy, Housing, Safety, Education, Weather, Demographics) and one overall score. A score is not an opinion. For every metric we take the city value and rank it against the national distribution of all US cities, then convert that percentile to a 1 to 10 scale and an A+ to F letter grade.
In plain terms: a city in the 90th percentile for median income scores near the top on that metric, while one in the 20th percentile scores low. Category scores are the weighted average of the metrics inside them, and the overall score is the average of the six categories.
Metrics where lower is better (crime rate, poverty rate, unemployment, cost burden) are inverted before ranking, so that safer and more affordable always means a higher score. Cities missing the data for a metric are excluded from that metric rather than assigned a zero, so a gap never silently drags a score down.
Where each number comes from, and how current it is
Every figure traces to an official dataset. Below is the source, what it covers, and how often we refresh it.
US Census Bureau
American Community Survey, 5-year estimates
Population, income, poverty, education, housing, commute and household data. Refreshed each year when the new 5-year release is published.
FBI
Uniform Crime Reporting, annual
Violent and property crime counts converted to rates per 100,000 residents. Updated when the FBI publishes the prior year.
NOAA
Climate Normals, 30-year
Temperature, precipitation, snowfall, humidity and sunny days from the current 30-year normals period, mapped to the nearest station.
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Local Area Unemployment, monthly to annual
Unemployment and labor force participation, aggregated to an annual figure for the city or its county.
HUD & Census Housing
Fair Market Rents & ACS Housing
Median home value, median rent, homeownership and cost burden. Refreshed alongside the yearly ACS and HUD releases.
NCES & Census Education
Education attainment tables
High school and college attainment and school district context, from the education tables of the same ACS vintage.
What the data can and cannot tell you
Small places carry larger margins of error. For a town of a few thousand people, survey-based figures like median income or rent are estimates with a real confidence interval, not exact counts. We show them because they are still useful, but treat single small-city numbers as directional rather than precise.
Crime data depends on local agencies reporting to the FBI. Where an agency did not report for a year, we fall back to the most recent available year or the county figure, and never fabricate a value.
Outside the United States, comparable per-city government data is far thinner. For international cities we publish only the fields we can source reliably and leave the rest blank rather than filling gaps with a national average pretending to be a city figure.
See a number that looks wrong?
Data corrections matter to us. Tell us the city and metric and we will trace it back to the source.