Decide where to live in the US with real numbers, not vibes.
Thinking about moving to the US? Already living here and looking for a better place? This explorer runs your household — income, family, lifestyle — against all 3,222 US counties at once. Taxes, housing, schools, climate, safety, local context — on official public data, with every caveat declared.
Start with what you want, then open the full county search.
The wizard asks direct questions — cost, weather, politics, safety, schools, healthcare, remote work, nature, jobs, and daily mobility — one step at a time.
At the end it turns your answers into normal search filters and sort arguments, so the results page is shareable and still exposes every source-backed metric.
3,222 counties. Dozens of federal agencies. One question.
"Where should I live?" turns into a research project the moment you take it seriously. Tax burden, after-tax housing cost, school quality, crime, air quality, climate, broadband, healthcare access — the answers exist, but they live in separate Census, IRS, BLS, EPA, FEMA, NOAA, FBI, HUD, NCES, and CDC files with different vintages, geographies, and quirks.
Generic "best places to live" lists collapse all that into a single ranking that nobody can defend. This tool does the opposite: it unifies the public data at the county level, lets you run your own household scenario, and shows you the raw comparable numbers under your own filters and sorts.
While you're here — county facts.
A few useful bits of context for anyone reading US county data.
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Compare counties the way you'd actually compare them.
Run a real tax scenario
Income, household composition, industry, 401(k) / HSA / IRA / FSA, deductions, capital gains, Social Security. Get federal + state + local income and sales tax estimates per county — not just state averages.
Filter and sort by anything
Tax burden, after-tax-after-housing income, median rent, school scores, crime, air quality, climate normals, broadband, healthcare access, demographics, amenities, hazards.
Compare counties side by side
Pin a shortlist, open the compare view, and see every relevant metric next to each other with explicit fallback modes and provenance.
Map view with overlays
County choropleth with optional overlays for military installations and polluting facilities, so spatial context isn't an afterthought.
County detail pages
Money, housing, schools, spatial, and demographic tabs per county — including largest places, housing structure mix, FMR / SAFMR, FHFA price trends, and ZORI / ZHVI rent and value overlays.
Real monthly cost and benefits fit
See monthly-burn estimates in results and Compare, scenario-based benefits/grants prompts, and hidden red-flag warnings for caveated risks worth checking. Screening only — not eligibility advice.
Multilingual UI
Available in 14 languages, auto-detected from your browser.
See how one county metric moves against another.
Pick any two source-backed metrics — wages and rent, hospitals and population, schools and broadband, migration and housing permits — and view them on two national maps at once.
A third map shows their raw ratio county by county. Scenario-dependent scores stay on search and detail pages, where they can be compared inside one scenario.
403 source families, backed by 546 documented source entries.
Every metric ships with its publisher, vintage, retrieval method, license, and caveat. No scraped private sources; no opaque blends. Browse the full registry under Data sources.
Connected source families
- Census ACS / PUMS / TIGER
- IRS + BLS QCEW / LAUS
- EPA AirData / SDWA / TRI
- FEMA NRI / NFIP / NFHL
- NOAA / NWS / AAAAI / AAFA climate, weather, allergens
- FBI CDE
- HUD / FHFA / Zillow / EIA / DOE housing & utilities
- CDC / ATSDR / HRSA / CMS health
- NCES / CRDC / EDFacts / state assessment schools
- FCC + Ookla broadband
- ... and 393 more source families in the full source registry
Honest about what's modeled and what isn't.
Composite scores are explainable percentile-based formulas of named inputs, not a black box. Every score declares its mode — fallbacks are explicit, not silent.
- Taxes: federal, payroll, and state income/sales always modeled per-county. Local income tax is a local add-on layer, not a state-average substitute: MD, NY, PA, IN, OH (88/88), MI (16/83), and KY (110 rate counties + 10 no-local) are wired where a defensible county mapping exists. Coverage is partial because many local taxes are city, school-district, special-district, or work-location rules rather than countywide official tables; other counties keep the local add-on explicit as not modeled while state income tax is still calculated separately. Local sales tax is per-county for AR, CA, FL, GA, NC, NV, NY, SC, TN, WI, WY, IL, AZ, AL, OK, TX, WA, and IA (unincorporated-county proxy); LA uses an official state-aggregate local rate until a parish selector is connected; other states are not silently averaged.
- Housing: ACS rent and home-value medians, HUD FMR/SAFMR benchmarks, FHFA county HPI trends, and Zillow ZORI/ZHVI rent and value overlays — kept as separate descriptive signals, never blended into a single price.
- Schools: NCES CCD enrollment, EDFacts FS195 SY 22-23 chronic absenteeism, and CRDC advanced-course access proxies feed the canonical school score. SEDA and ERS cross-state academic context are descriptive only.
- Air quality: strict county EPA AirData monitors where present, explicit state-level population-weighted fallback otherwise, and a no-data tier when neither exists.
- Crime: FBI CDE only. Counties without mapped agency coverage use the official state-aggregate fallback with a caution tier instead of being silently dropped.
- Climate & hazards: NOAA 1991-2020 county weather normals, observed trends since 1990, official Climate Explorer hot-day projection context, and FEMA NRI hazard risk.
- Relocation context: insurance, utilities, migration, healthcare, housing construction, commute/mobility, labor-market, politics, and amenities are exposed as named layers with their own caveats. Persona, monthly-cost, benefits/grants, and hidden-red-flag summaries are derived products on top of these declared inputs.
Free. No account required.
Nothing to sign up for. Nothing tracked beyond basic analytics. Nothing sold. Pick a county scenario and start exploring.
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