Fortune 50 Best Places to Live for Families 2023 Methodology
To select the Best Places to Live for Families in each state, Fortune evaluated nearly 1,900 cities, towns, suburbs, exurbs, villages, and townships that had approximately 20,000 residents across all 50 states in the U.S. This range provided a broad universe of places that offered high-quality amenities in communities with a hometown feel.
To help thoroughly analyze each place, Fortune reviewed more than 200,000 unique data points across five broad categories:
- Education
- Aging resources
- General wellness
- Financial health
- Livability
This ranking focused on multigenerational families, many of whom are shouldering the responsibilities of raising their own children while caring for aging parents. With their needs in mind, Fortune paid particular attention to factors that met the unique challenges of this cohort—such as the quality of local public schools, graduation rates, nearby college affordability, the number of quality nursing homes, assisted living communities, home health care agencies, risk of social isolation among older residents, and access to solid health care providers.
To ensure the winning places were cities and towns where residents could afford to buy homes without breaking the bank, 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 higher than the national median.
Additionally, Fortune wanted to highlight places that offered diverse neighborhoods. To that end, Fortune’s staff compared the racial breakdown of each place against state benchmarks, eliminating any place that was 75% less diverse than the state medians. Fortune also incorporated socioeconomic, religious, and ethnic diversity into its data collection process.
Where our data comes from
To build this ranking, Fortune worked with several critical data partners—including Caring.com, CVS Health, GreatSchools, Healthgrades, IneedanA.com, Sharecare, and Witlytic—that helped provide information about more than 110 separate data categories for each place used in our comprehensive evaluation process.
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, Integrated Postsecondary Education System, Johns Hopkins University Data Archive, Kaiser Family Foundation, Realtor.com, 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 and 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.
