How City Zip Compare Builds Its Rankings

Every ranking on City Zip Compare is reproducible from publicly available Census Bureau data. We don't blend in vendor data, we don't apply opinion-driven weights, and we don't change the methodology release-to-release. Here's exactly what we do.

Source tables

All metrics come from the American Community Survey 5-year estimates (ACS5). Specifically: B01003 (population), B19013 (median household income), B19301 (per capita income), B25077 (median home value), B25064 (median gross rent), B25003 (housing tenure), B23025 (employment status), B15003 (educational attainment), B08303 (commute time), and S0101 (age structure).

Refresh schedule

The Census Bureau releases the ACS5 in early December each year. We pull the new vintage within 30 days of release. Place pages display the vintage of the underlying data; rankings always use the most recent release.

Geography handling

ZIP queries are mapped to the closest Census ZCTA. About 95% of residential ZIPs match cleanly. P.O. Box-only and unique-recipient ZIPs return no Census data, and we say so on the page.

City queries use Census 'place' geography (incorporated cities, towns, and Census-designated places). County queries use Census county FIPS. State queries use Census state FIPS.

What we don't do

We don't apply weighting schemes that could be gamed by vendors. We don't fold in proprietary data. We don't publish a single composite 'best places' score because every such score is opinion-driven and we'd rather show you the underlying numbers.

If you find a ranking on this site you can't reproduce from the cited Census table, it's a bug. Contact us via the link in the footer and we'll fix it.

What we deliberately leave out, and where to actually find it

Two categories come up constantly in reader questions: crime and school quality. Neither is a Census product, and we'd rather be upfront about that than blend in a third-party score with an undisclosed methodology. For crime data, see our guide on where the real numbers live, which points to the FBI's Crime Data Explorer. For school data, see our guide on comparing schools, which points to the Department of Education's NCES.

This is a deliberate trade-off. It would be easy to make the site feel more 'complete' by adding a synthetic safety or school score. We think a site that's honest about what it doesn't cover is more trustworthy than one that fills every gap with an opaque estimate — and it's why every number here traces back to a table you can look up yourself.

How to verify any number on this site

Every figure we show is traceable to a specific ACS5 table code, which we cite in the relevant blog post or page footnote. If you want to verify a number independently, search that table code directly on data.census.gov for the same geography and vintage year — you should get the same figure, within normal rounding. That's the whole point of building on public data instead of a private index: nothing here requires you to trust us blindly.