Fortune 50 Best Places to Live for Families 2024 Methodology
To select the Best Places to Live for Families, Fortune evaluated over 2,000 cities, towns, suburbs, exurbs, villages, and townships, each with approximately 20,000 residents or more, across all 50 states in the U.S. This wide-ranging analysis provided a broad array of places that offer essential resources from health care to education as well as a sense of community.
To help thoroughly analyze each place, Fortune reviewed nearly 200 data categories across five main themes:
- Education
- Resources for aging adults
- General wellness
- Financial health
- Livability
This ranking focused on the best places for families, many of whom are shouldering the responsibilities of raising their own children while caring for aging parents. With these needs in mind, Fortune paid particular attention to services that will help people and their families age well. Our team gave special consideration to resources for aging adults, livability, and wellness, accounting for the importance of residents’ well-being, the number of quality nursing homes in an area, the number of mental health providers, the safety of a town, as well as its racial and ethnic diversity.
To ensure the winning places were cities and towns that were relatively affordable, Fortune eliminated locales with home sale prices that were more than twice as high as the state median and/or more than 2.75 times as high as the national median.
Fortune also wanted to ensure the list offered diverse neighborhoods. To that end, our staff compared the racial breakdown of each place against state benchmarks, eliminating any location that was 75% less diverse than the state median. Fortune incorporated socioeconomic, religious, and ethnic diversity into its data collection process as well.
Where our data comes from
To build this ranking, Fortune worked with several critical data partners—including Caring.com, CVS Health, Healthgrades, Ineedana.com, Sharecare, and Witlytic—that helped provide information for nearly 200 separate data categories in our comprehensive evaluation process. CVS Health is a sponsor of Fortune Well.
Fortune also sourced data from America’s Health Rankings, ATTOM Data Solutions, the Council for Community and Economic Research, the School Finance Indicators Database, Everytown Gun Law Rankings, Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, the Johns Hopkins University Data Archive, Kaiser Family Foundation, SchoolDigger, and STI: PopStats.
In addition to private-sector data, Fortune relied on information from federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Center for Health Statistics, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the U.S. Department of Education.
Credits
Fortune Best Places to Live for Families was created under the direction of Fortune Well editor Jennifer Fields and senior health and wellness reporter Alexa Mikhail, and was written by Hillary Hoffower. Copy editing was provided by Lauren Goldstein. Production was led by Lydia Belanger. Additional reporting was provided by senior health and wellness reporter Beth Greenfield, and health and wellness reporter Lindsey Leake. Art and photography were led by executive creative director Peter Herbert, creative director Josue Evilla, photo director Mia Diehl, and associate photo editor Alex Scimecca.
