This page explains, plainly and honestly, where MoveWiser's city data comes from, what each category score represents, and how the overall MoveWiser Score is calculated — so you can judge how much weight to give it.
MoveWiser is a relocation tool. You answer a short survey about your budget, lifestyle, climate, household, and priorities, and MoveWiser recommends specific cities that fit those answers — each with a match percentage and a set of category scores.
Alongside the survey, MoveWiser keeps a profile for each city in its database. Those profiles power the city pages and rankings you see across the site. This page is about how those city profiles and their scores are produced.
City data is produced in three stages. There is no single static dataset — the profiles are built from the recommendations the survey generates, then enriched with additional detail.
When someone takes the survey, an AI model with access to current web search proposes four city recommendations. For each one it returns a match percentage, four category scores (cost of living, safety, schools, healthcare), typical rent and grocery figures, a short description, and the data sources it drew on. These are the model's estimates for that person's move, informed by web data at that moment.
MoveWiser aggregates every survey recommendation into canonical city records. For each city, the four category scores are averaged across all surveys that recommended it, and the match percentages are averaged the same way. A city that has never been recommended has no profile yet — so the database grows from real survey activity.
A separate AI pass adds four more category scores — housing affordability, job market, transportation, and walkability — plus written content such as an overview, pros and cons, FAQs, a climate description, statistics (population, home prices, salaries), and the city-specific context sections shown on each city page. This pass also uses web search, and it preserves the existing category scores and the overall MoveWiser Score — enrichment never re-ranks a city.
Each category score is a 1–10 rating — 10 is best on that dimension. They are MoveWiser's comparative assessments of a city, not measurements taken from a single official source.
Cost of Living
How far a typical household budget goes — rent, groceries, and everyday costs.
Safety
Relative crime levels and day-to-day security for residents.
Schools
The strength of local educational options and outcomes.
Healthcare
Access to hospitals, primary care, and specialists.
Housing Affordability
How attainable buying or renting a home is (enrichment score).
Job Market
Strength of local employment opportunities (enrichment score).
Transportation
Quality of public transit and mobility options (enrichment score).
Walkability
How walkable daily life is (enrichment score).
The overall MoveWiser Score (0–100) is a simple, unweighted average of exactly four category scores — Cost of Living, Safety, Schools, and Healthcare — scaled by ten and rounded to the nearest whole number:
There is no hidden weighting and no weighting tiers. Each of those four scores counts equally. We chose a plain average on purpose so the score is easy to understand and verify against the four scores shown on a city page.
The four enrichment scores — Housing Affordability, Job Market, Transportation, and Walkability — are shown on each city page as additional context but are notincluded in the overall MoveWiser Score. This means two cities can have the same overall Score yet differ on those four dimensions, which is why we display all eight.
It matters to know which figures on a city page come from outside sources and which are MoveWiser's own assessment:
City profiles update in two ways. First, every time new surveys are aggregated, a city's four base scores and match statistics refresh from the latest recommendations. Second, the enrichment step refreshes written content and the four enrichment scores; each city page shows the date its profile was last enriched.
MoveWiser does not run on a fixed, guaranteed update schedule for every city. A city that is recommended often and enriched recently will have fresher information than one that has not.
During generation and enrichment, the AI model references public web data and reports which sources it drew on — these are listed on each city page under "Data & sources." MoveWiser does not manually verify every figure against the original source, and the named sources are the model's own report of what it used rather than a hand-curated bibliography.
Scores are comparative estimates, not official statistics. For a real relocation decision, treat them as a starting point and confirm specifics — especially cost figures and safety — with primary sources.
MoveWiser is an automated, AI-driven tool. It does not employ a human team of reviewers, editors, or topic experts who individually vet each city profile, and none of the content here should imply that it does. The value of MoveWiser is fast, consistent, comparable city matching — not manual verification.
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