The flagship county report card.

What CountyScore Is

CountyScore is a data-journalism platform, not a real-estate or relocation advisory service. Our purpose is to take county-level statistics published by the federal government and present them in a form a regular person can actually compare and act on. If you are deciding where to move, evaluating counties for retirement, or just want to know how your county stacks up nationally, this site is built for you.

Every page on the site is built from primary-source datasets: U.S. Census Bureau ACS, FBI UCR, CDC County Health Rankings, FEMA National Risk Index, NCES, EPA SDWIS, and NOAA NCEI. Each statistic is attributed to its source, and the underlying methodology is published on the methodology page.

Who Runs CountyScore

Why I Built CountyScore

I built CountyScore as the flagship hub to combine every vertical's data into a single county report card — the site I wish existed when I was evaluating where to move. The government already collects extraordinary data on every county in America: property taxes, cost of living, crime rates, health outcomes, school quality, disaster risk, water quality, and more. But that data is scattered across dozens of federal websites, buried in spreadsheets, and nearly impossible to compare side by side.

I wanted a single page where a regular person could see, in 30 seconds, how their county compares on every dimension that matters — with the sources right there on the page. No paywall, no gatekeeping, just public data presented honestly and comparably.

That same need shows up in every vertical we cover: property taxes, cost of living, crime, schools, health, environmental risk, water quality, weather, soil, and lawn care. The government already collects this data. Our job is to clean it, verify it, normalize it into comparable 0-100 scores, and make it understandable.

How the County Score Works

Each of the 3,144 U.S. counties receives a composite score from 0 to 100 based on weighted factors across nine baseline categories:

• Property Taxes — effective tax rates and median amounts paid
• Cost of Living — housing costs, median rent, and affordability
• Safety — violent and property crime rates
• Health — health outcomes, access to care, and life expectancy
• Schools — school quality, per-pupil spending, and graduation rates
• Disaster Risk — exposure to natural hazards like floods, wildfires, and storms
• Water Quality — drinking water safety and compliance history
• Income & Jobs — median household income and employment levels
• Weather & Climate — average temperatures, precipitation, and extreme weather events

Higher scores indicate counties that perform well across these dimensions. Scores are relative — a score of 80 means a county ranks in roughly the top 20% nationally. The exact weights and formulas are published on our methodology page.

Specialized data such as soil quality, lawn care difficulty, and farmers market access may appear as lifestyle or standalone ranking signals, but those signals do not change the baseline CountyScore composite. Farmers Markets is experimental and is not part of the first-wave County Fit Score lenses.

Data Sources

All data used by CountyScore comes from publicly available U.S. federal government sources. We do not use proprietary or paywalled data.

• U.S. Census Bureau (ACS) — Property taxes, housing costs, income, demographics
• FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) — Violent and property crime rates
• CDC / County Health Rankings — Health outcomes, access to care, health behaviors
• FEMA National Risk Index (NRI) — Natural hazard risk scores by county
• National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) — School performance, spending, enrollment
• EPA Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) — Water quality violations and compliance
• NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) — Weather patterns, temperatures, precipitation, and extreme events

Each source's URL, release date, and pull date are documented on the methodology page. Source datasets are in the public domain (federal works) or published under licenses permitting commercial redistribution with attribution.

How We Decide What to Publish

Two documents govern this site's editorial decisions:

• Editorial Standards — our mission, source policy, AI-usage policy, corrections process, funding disclosure, and update cadence.
• Methodology — the exact data sources, composite-score formula, limitations, and update cadence behind every page.

Both documents carry a "Last reviewed" date and are regenerated when our methodology changes.

Our Relationship to the Data

CountyScore is independent. We are not affiliated with the U.S. Census Bureau, the FBI, the CDC, FEMA, NCES, the EPA, NOAA, or any government agency. We use their public datasets under the licenses they publish — for federal works, that is public-domain release. Each county page credits the data source that drives it.

When we link out — for example, to a state Medicaid portal, a county assessor's office, or to HealthCare.gov — we link to primary sources, not aggregators.

AI in Our Workflow

Per-county pages include a short narrative summary generated with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) from the same statistics shown on the page. This is a tool for turning a row of numbers into a readable paragraph; it is not the source of any data on the site. The narrative prompt is constrained to forbid causation claims, treatment recommendations, investment advice, and unsourced inference. The Data Editor reviews the prompt and spot-checks output before publication. When source data is refreshed, narratives are regenerated.

We disclose this clearly because honesty is the right policy — and because Google's policies treat undisclosed AI authorship as a separate problem from AI authorship itself. The fix for AI prose on a data site is not to hide it; the fix is to pair it with a named human editor, a clear methodology, and source-grounded constraints. That is what we do.

The ByCounty Network

CountyScore is the hub of the ByCounty Network — a family of independent data sites that each focus on one category of county-level data in depth. While CountyScore gives you the big picture, the vertical sites let you dive deep into any single dimension:

• TaxByCounty — Property tax rates and comparisons
• PropertyTaxByZip — ZIP-code-level property tax data
• CostByCounty — Cost of living data
• CrimeByCounty — Crime rates and safety data
• IncomeByCounty — Household income and employment
• HealthByCounty — Health outcomes and access
• SchoolsByCounty — School quality and education data
• RiskByCounty — Natural disaster risk assessments
• WaterByCounty — Water quality information
• WeatherByCounty — Weather patterns and climate data
• SoilByCounty — Soil quality and composition data
• LawnByCounty — Lawn care difficulty and grass suitability

Every site in the network shares the same editorial standards, the same data pipeline, and the same commitment to transparency.

Free and Open

CountyScore is completely free to use. No account is required, and there are no paywalls. Our goal is to make county-level data accessible to everyone — whether you are a first-time homebuyer, a retiree exploring new places, or a researcher studying regional trends.

The site is supported by display advertising and affiliate partnerships with services relevant to people researching counties (mortgage lenders, moving companies, home insurance providers, etc.). These partnerships never influence our rankings, scores, or editorial decisions.

Contact

For data corrections, source attributions, partnership questions, or press inquiries, write to editorial@countyscore.com. See our editorial standards for the corrections process and timelines.