Find your happy place

Turn the dials to say what you care about — cheaper housing, higher income, a real dollar (cost-adjusted), a stronger job market, a place that's gaining people — and the map re-shades and the ranked list re-orders live to match. This isn't a hidden "happy score": the composite is a plain weighted average of each measure's national percentile, every dial oriented so more = better, and you can see exactly what went into it. Drag a slider to zero to drop a measure from the mix.

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Wikipedia summary & image licensed CC BY-SA. Each measure shows its own latest available year; a blank means no published figure for this county (honest absence, never a fabricated zero). Net migration is the IRS exemptions figure (≈ people).

The score is the weighted average national percentile across the measures you weighted — 0% = the worst fit for your priorities, 100% = the best. It's an ingredient blend you can see, never a black-box verdict: change a dial and watch exactly which places rise. A county is scored only on the measures it actually has — "scored on N of M" tells you how complete its picture is (Connecticut's new planning regions, for example, have income and jobs but not yet a home-value or affordability figure, so they're ranked on what they do have rather than dumped to the bottom for missing data).

Your top 25 happy places

The contract (same as everywhere here). The dials live in the browser — the data vault never baked a "happy score." This page only weights and blends the ingredients the mart already serves (each measure's national percentile), so two people with different priorities get different maps from the exact same data. Want to look at one measure at a time, or compare two specific places? Try the single-measure map or compare two places.