Nothing on this site is typed in by hand and left to rot. The figures inside a guide, the tape under its title, the rankings and the map all read from one table, and that table is refreshed on a schedule you can see.
Under the title of every guide sits a strip of live readings, and the same numbers appear inside the article where a writer would once have typed them. They are the readings a person weighs before a move, and they update themselves.
Hover or tap a figure and you get the source, the period it covers and how the place stands against the others. When a source publishes a new month, the figure changes on every page that carries it, with no one editing a post.
Raw data from one agency makes a poor ranking. A satellite’s clear-sky count says nothing about how strong the sun is, and a violent-crime rate says nothing about burglary. So each Honest Local score blends at least two public sources. Every source ranks each place against every other place that has it, those ranks are scaled from 0 to 100, and the average is the score. That is why a score reads as a number out of 100, and why the reading behind it sits right beside it on the map and the hubs.
A state is not a big city. Its housing costs, its air and its weather are spread across places that have little in common, so we rank the 50 states on their own list and the cities on theirs. For weather and air, a state’s reading is built from its largest cities, weighted by population, so Phoenix never stands in for all of Arizona. For taxes, income and prices we use the figures the agencies publish for the state itself.
If a source has no reading for a place, the place shows no reading. We do not fill the gap with a neighbor’s number, a national average or a guess, and a place with a gap is left out of that ranking rather than ranked on a made-up figure. Where a source covers a metro rather than a city, the figure says so.
Every ranking, map layer and guide has a Cite block with a ready-made line and a link. Quote the number, name The Honest Local, link the page. The page will still be there, and the number on it will still be current, which is more than a screenshot can promise.
If a number looks wrong, it is either the source’s figure, which we will show you, or our mistake, which we will fix on every page at once. Tell us here.
The Honest Local, Every number here has a source, a date and a rank, September 2026, https://thehonestlocal.com/how-we-get-our-numbers
Free to reuse with attribution (CC BY 4.0). Data last moved September 21, 2026. Every number on the page carries its own source and period; cite those with it.
Weather normals are NOAA’s 1991 to 2020 set and change only when NOAA reissues them. Everything else refreshes on the cadence named above. Real-time readings (air, gas) are what the source reported at the moment of the last fetch, and the tape says when that was.