WorkspaceTop ListsAboutContact Us

About Move Where USA

Find a place that fits

Compare communities around your priorities, not someone else's generic list. See the tradeoffs, inspect the evidence behind each rating, and decide what deserves a closer look.

Build a search around what matters

Start with a guided set of questions about the life you want, from climate and housing to careers, community, transportation, and access to the things you enjoy. Move Where USA turns those choices into a personalized search you can keep refining.

Refine with Chat

Tell the relocation guide what you want to change in everyday language. Chat can intelligently adjust your preferences, show you the proposed changes, and update your rankings as your needs become clearer.

Tune the details yourself

Prefer direct control? Use Priorities to manually raise or lower weights, and Filters to set practical boundaries such as states, place types, proximity, or other non-negotiables.

Understand your matches

Explore ranked results in summary, spreadsheet, or map views. Open individual places to see strengths, tradeoffs, score details, and source information before deciding where to look more closely.

Our data standard

Evidence you can inspect, not a mystery score.

Move Where USA combines documented government, academic, and open-data sources to compare communities across the country. We document and display the sources for every score so that you can verify the evidence for yourself.

Every rating page shows its goal, source date, input data, what the evidence tells us, and the limits of the measure.

Sources named

See the dataset behind each published rating.

Methods traceable

Review what we measure and how it becomes a rating.

Limits included

Vintages, proxies, coverage gaps, and caveats stay visible.

Data sources

Built on trustworthy sources

This catalog covers all 41 external source families used by published ratings, with 133 direct data and documentation links. Each rating page identifies the exact dataset and vintage behind that measure.

People & opportunity

Population, housing, work, and taxes

4 sources

Core measures of who lives in a place, what housing costs, how residents work, and the state tax environment.

Education

Adult attainment and school outcomes

6 sources

Resident adult educational attainment plus public-school achievement, growth, graduation, advanced-course access, and the district geography used to connect schools to places.

  • U.S. Census ACS Educational Attainment

    Direct 2020-2024 ACS five-year S1501 percentages, counts, and published 90% margins for resident adults age 25+ at high-school-or-higher, bachelor's-or-higher, and graduate/professional thresholds.

    2024 ACS adult educational attainment (S1501)

  • Stanford Education Data Archive 2025.1

    Administrative-district all-student math and reading/language-arts achievement on Stanford's subject-specific Cohort Standardized scales, plus combined-subject grade-to-grade learning rates on the Grade Year Standardized scale. The fixed-score criteria use Empirical-Bayes estimates and adjusted standard errors. Pooled 2022-2025 evidence is preferred; 2009-2019 is an explicitly historical fallback.

    SEDA 2025.1 downloadsPermanent dataset recordAdministrative-district achievement CSVAdministrative-district growth CSVCodebookTechnical documentationMethods

  • Stanford Education Data Archive 6.0 (legacy school criteria)

    County-level pooled math, reading, and academic-growth estimates retained only for version-aware explanations of historical stored results and school criteria that have not yet moved to approved current lineages.

    SEDA 6.0 downloads

  • U.S. Education Department Ed Data Express

    Official EDFacts 2022-23 all-student four-year adjusted-cohort graduation rates and cohort counts for local education agencies. Public School Quality uses eligible exact-district evidence only inside its modest confidence-weighted graduation contribution.

    2022-23 four-year ACGR data builder

  • Urban Institute Education Data API

    CCD, CRDC, and EDFacts school data for enrollment, graduation, AP/IB, dual enrollment, testing participation, and advanced-course availability.

    API documentation

  • National Center for Education Statistics

    Current 2024-2025 administrative, elementary, secondary, and unified school-district boundaries. Public-School Math Achievement, Reading Achievement, and Academic Growth use exact administrative, elementary, or unified containment of the place representative point and never a nearest-district fallback.

    District-boundary overviewCurrent composite boundary layer

Safety, climate & environment

Crime, weather, air, hazards, and future risk

11 sources

Observed conditions and modeled risk signals used to compare personal safety, climate comfort, air quality, disasters, smoke, and resilience.

  • FBI Crime Data Explorer via OpenCrime

    Processed FBI city and state reporting for violent and property crime, with jurisdiction coverage and reporting limitations retained in rating explanations.

    Processed FBI data

  • NOAA U.S. Climate Normals

    1991–2020 annual, seasonal, and hourly station normals for heat, cold, precipitation, snowfall, humidity, dew point, heat index, and wind.

    Climate normals

  • National Weather Service Heat Index

    Official apparent-temperature method combining air temperature and relative humidity under shaded, light-wind assumptions.

    Heat Index methodology

  • National Weather Service Beaufort wind scale

    Official reference bands that relate sustained wind speeds to familiar calm, light-air, breeze, and stronger-wind descriptions.

    Beaufort wind scale

  • Stanford wildfire-smoke PM2.5 model

    Peer-reviewed daily 10 km wildfire-attributable surface PM2.5 estimates, aggregated to counties for the long-run smoke-exposure baseline.

    Replication data and county estimates

  • NOAA Hazard Mapping System

    Daily light, medium, and heavy smoke-plume polygons used to identify recent EPA monitor days with stronger satellite-observed smoke overhead.

    Annual smoke bundles

  • U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

    AirData monitoring summaries, finalized ozone design-value reports, and Level III ecoregions used as broad vegetation context for pollen potential.

    EPA AirDataOzone design valuesLevel III ecoregions

  • USDA Forest Service Science Tree Canopy Cover

    Modeled 30-meter percent tree-canopy cover sampled around named communities as the local vegetation input for tree-pollen screening.

    Tree Canopy Cover data

  • North American allergenic-pollen calendars

    Peer-reviewed daily pollen calendars and annual taxon totals from National Allergy Bureau stations used to calibrate and validate the tree-pollen exposure model.

    Published pollen calendars

  • FEMA National Risk Index

    County natural-hazard risk, expected annual loss, social vulnerability, and community-resilience inputs across major hazard types.

    NRI metadataNRI access

  • Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation

    Federal county screening data used for projected extreme heat, consecutive dry spells, extreme precipitation, late-century sea-level-rise exposure, and the current published Wildfire Hazard Potential class.

    CMRA documentation

Health & care

Outcomes, hospitals, clinicians, and shortages

6 sources

Population-health estimates and facility, provider, quality, shortage, and safety-net data used in health and accessibility ratings.

Community & civic life

Politics, policy inclusion, and religion

4 sources

County election results, state and municipal LGBTQ policy scorecards, and county religious-organization data used as clearly labeled community proxies.

  • County Presidential Election Returns

    County presidential vote shares used for broad liberal, conservative, moderation, and political-homogeneity comparisons.

    MIT Election Data & Science Lab

  • Movement Advancement Project LGBTQ Equality Maps

    Current state and District of Columbia policy tallies across more than 50 LGBTQ-related laws and policies, used as the 70% statewide component of LGBTQ Policy Environment.

    State policy maps

  • Human Rights Campaign Municipal Equality Index

    Selected municipal policy and inclusion scorecards used as the 30% reviewed-local component of LGBTQ Policy Environment; unreviewed localities receive a disclosed conservative factor.

    Municipal scorecards

  • U.S. Religion Census

    County congregations and adherent counts used for religious prevalence, diversity, pluralism, and broad faith-community measures.

    2020 data documentation

Access, maps & outdoors

Transit, destinations, terrain, airports, and recreation

10 sources

Mapped infrastructure, venues, landforms, protected areas, airports, and ski areas used for proximity and access ratings.

  • EPA Smart Location Database and National Walkability Index

    Block-group walkability, activity density, transit-stop walking distance, peak scheduled frequency, and fixed-guideway access population-weighted into Census places for Walkability and Transit Access.

    National Walkability Index methodologySmart Location mapping

  • Bureau of Transportation Statistics National Transit Map

    Current mapped public-transit stops and modes used as a limited corroboration and coverage fallback for place-wide Transit Access.

    National Transit Map

  • U.S. Census Bureau TIGERweb Hydrography

    Official areal lakes, reservoirs, rivers, bays, and coastal water used as the physical-water foundation for Water Recreation Access; place-directory pins cannot create water evidence by themselves.

    Areal hydrography service

  • Overture Maps Foundation Places

    Open place records used for dining, nightlife, culture, live music, parks, trails, beaches, water recreation, surf scenes, and regional gateways. Water-recreation places count only after physical-water validation.

    Places documentation

  • Overture Maps Foundation Transportation

    Fixed-release trail-compatible path, footway, track, steps, and bridleway linework used as one of two bounded Hiking Access trail inventories.

    Transportation documentation

  • U.S. Geological Survey

    National Digital Trails linework and PAD-US protected natural land used for Hiking Access, plus GNIS community coordinates and native 3DEP terrain used for horizon and elevation measures.

    National Digital TrailsPAD-USGNIS3DEP

  • National Park Service

    Land Resources boundary data used to measure proximity to National Park Service protected areas.

    Boundary data

  • Federal Aviation Administration

    Final annual passenger boardings plus primary/commercial-service and hub classifications used to identify passenger airports and estimate service scale.

    Passenger boarding dataAirport categories

  • OurAirports

    Open airport identity and coordinate records used to locate FAA-classified commercial passenger airports.

    Airport data

  • OpenSkiMap and OpenStreetMap

    Mapped ski-area geometry and attributes used to estimate access to nearby downhill skiing.

    Ski-area data