Why CityFunIndex exists

The question other rankings skip

Walk Score asks how walkable a place is. Niche scores its schools and demographics. AreaVibes blends seven livability categories. All of them optimise for cost of living, commute times, school ratings and job markets. All of that matters. But none of it tells you whether a place is any fun — whether there is live music on a Tuesday, trails twenty minutes from downtown, or a food scene worth staying in town for. CityFunIndex measures exactly that, and only that — across 23 factors, more than any comparable US city index publishes.

One number, every city compared the same way

The Fun Score is a single 0–100 rating built from 23 factors — 16 that make a city fun and 7 that wear it down. Every city is measured on the identical set and ranked head to head against every other city in the index. Nothing about the formula is hidden: the factors, their weights and the math are all laid out on the methodology page, with a worked example you can check against your own city.

Built on a mix of open and licensed data

Every factor traces back to a named source. The civic backbone comes from open government and public datasets — the US Census Bureau, the FBI, NOAA, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata. The cultural and venue layer that tells you what is actually open right now — restaurants, music venues, nightlife, parks at their current quality — comes from licensed commercial APIs that maintain the live business graph.

The mix is deliberate: open data alone is too stale to capture a city's current scene, and proprietary data alone is too closed to audit. Using both gives a score that is both fresh and defensible. The full source list is on the methodology page.

Who it is built for

The free site is built for the person picking a weekend trip, a move, or a tour stop — and for the journalist or researcher who wants a neutral cross-city comparison they can cite. The paid tier is built for the products that need a credible fun signal on top of an address: relocation and real-estate sites, travel and hospitality apps, employer brand pages, and economic-development teams who want a defensible number to point at. The business page walks through what a partnership looks like and the API page covers integration.

How it stays honest

Three commitments keep the score trustworthy:

• Independent by design. CityFunIndex is not sponsored by tourism boards, chambers of commerce or the cities it ranks. No city can pay to move up the list. The score reflects the data and nothing else.
• Predictable refresh cadence. The whole index is recomputed daily on a published calendar — long enough for new data to actually move the needle on slow signals, short enough that a score still tracks a city's real current state.
• Versioned algorithm. Every published score carries the algorithm version that produced it, and any change to the math ships under a new version. Existing integrations keep reading the version they were built against until they choose to upgrade.

Where things stand

CityFunIndex is in active development. Live data is now flowing — every city page carries a freshness chip showing when its score was last computed. The index covers 134 US cities today — the largest metros alongside a curated set of smaller places that punch well above their size. Fun is personal, too — so you can re-weight every factor and rank cities by what matters to you, or compare up to four cities head to head.