About MoveScore
Should you actually move here?
What we do
MoveScore grades U.S. cities on the factors that actually matter when you are deciding whether to relocate, using only public government data.
We focus on U.S. city livability, cost, climate, and quality of life. Every page on movescore.org is built from a composite of Census, EPA, FBI, NCES, BLS, and HUD public datasets, cited and linkable so readers can trace any number back to its source.
Who runs this
MoveScore is built and maintained by the MoveScore Team. We're a small group working on making public U.S. city livability, cost, climate, and quality of life data easier for non-specialists to read. If you have a correction, a data tip, or a question about how a number was derived, the contact email below reaches us directly.
Who this is for
MoveScore is built for people relocating for work, family, or retirement, plus reporters on the mobility beat.
Why this exists
Public data on U.S. city livability, cost, climate, and quality of life is technically free, but practically locked behind file formats, acronyms, and paywalled dashboards. MoveScoreexists to close that gap: take the raw federal and public-sector data, and turn it into pages a normal person can read in thirty seconds.
How we work
- Primary source only. We pull from a composite of Census, EPA, FBI, NCES, BLS, and HUD public datasets and cite the exact dataset and version on every page.
- No invented numbers. If a figure is not in the underlying public data, it does not appear on movescore.org. We never generate synthetic statistics to fill gaps.
- Methodology, in plain English. We build a composite livability score per city from six public datasets — Census ACS demographics, EPA air and water, FBI crime, NCES school quality, BLS wages and unemployment, and HUD fair-market rent — weighted and normalized into a single 0-100 number with transparent sub-scores.
- Refreshed on a schedule. Each component series refreshes on its own cadence (monthly to annually); the composite score is rebuilt monthly or whenever an input series updates.
- Corrections welcome. Readers flag issues all the time. When the source fixes a record, MoveScore follows.
Known limitations
Composite scores are only as good as their inputs — a city strong on five dimensions but weak on one still lands middling, which can hide real local differences. Weights are documented but editorial; two reasonable reviewers could weight them differently and land on a different ranking.
Why federal city-data deserves a public-facing relocation home
When people consider relocating, they need to compare cities on a set of factors that federal data already covers: cost of living (BLS CPI by metro), housing cost (Census ACS median rent and home value), wages and employment (BLS OEWS and the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages), crime (FBI Crime Data API), climate (NOAA Climate Normals), education (NCES district outcomes), and demographics (Census ACS). The federal data is comprehensive, public, and free. The problem is that no single federal portal puts the per-city comparison into a single page.
MoveScore consolidates these federal datasets into per-city pages and per-city-pair comparison pages. Every city page shows the cost of living index, median rent, median home value, the largest occupation sectors with median wage, the violent and property crime rates, the climate normals (temperature and precipitation), and the demographic breakdown. Every compare page shows two cities side by side on the same set of factors. The data is federal data that has always been public; the value MoveScore adds is the per-city, side-by-side presentation.
How the pipeline pulls multi-source data
The pipeline pulls from seven federal APIs on a cadence that matches each source’s release schedule. BLS metro CPI updates monthly; Census ACS updates annually with a 12-18 month lag; BLS OEWS updates twice yearly; FBI Crime Data updates annually; NOAA Climate Normals update once per decade. Each value on every city page is stamped with the source dataset and the release date so readers can verify any figure against the federal source.
A practical detail: not all federal datasets resolve to the city level. BLS publishes CPI for a subset of large metropolitan statistical areas, not every city. The state and metro CPI are used as the closest proxy where city-level data is not published. The methodology page documents which source feeds each card on the city page.
Where relocation data has caveats
Three caveats. First, cost-of-living index numbers depend heavily on the basket of goods used to compute them. Federal CPI is based on a national basket weighted by national consumption; the Council for Community and Economic Research ACCRA index uses a different basket weighted by professional-managerial households. The site uses the CPI-based comparison as the headline and notes the methodology, but a household whose spending differs substantially from the average (e.g., very low or very high housing share) may experience a different relative cost than the index suggests.
Second, crime rates are reported on the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) or National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) basis, which depends on local agencies submitting data. Cities with non-reporting or partially-reporting police agencies are missing data points; this is a known limitation of the FBI dataset and the affected cities are flagged.
Third, climate normals are 30-year averages. The most recent NOAA normals cover 1991-2020. Climate change effects within the current period are not captured by the normals; for forward-looking climate signal, the pages link to peer-reviewed regional climate projections rather than fabricate a projection. Every value links back to the originating federal dataset.
Independence
MoveScore is an independent publication. We are not funded, owned, or directed by any of the agencies, companies, or organizations that appear in our data. Hosting is paid for by advertising — see our Privacy Policy for details — and we do not take paid placements, sponsored rankings, or "remove-my-entry" fees.
History
MoveScore launched in 2026 as part of a small portfolio of independent public-data sites. It has been maintained and updated continuously since.
Contact
Tips, corrections, data-partnership questions, and press inquiries: hello@movescore.org. More options on our contact page.