FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Short answers to the questions that come up most. For the full picture of how a score is built, see the methodology page.
Looking for definitions instead? The glossary has every term used on the site.
About the Fun Score
What the score measures and how it is built.
What is the Fun Score?
It is a single number from 0 to 100 that answers one question: how much is there to do in this city? Higher means more — more to eat, hear, watch and explore, set against the friction that makes it harder to enjoy.
How is it calculated?
Every city is measured on 23 factors, each turned into a percentile against all other cities, blended by weight into one upside number and one friction number, and calibrated onto the 0–100 scale. The methodology page walks through every step.
Do you make these numbers up?
No. Every Fun Score traces back to real measurements — federal, state and city open datasets (Census, FBI, BLS, HUD, NOAA, EPA, FEMA, NPS, OSM and the like), public APIs and a small set of licensed commercial feeds for the venue, event and rating signals where they are the authoritative source. The methodology page walks through which signal feeds which factor, and every city page shows the measurement behind each factor score if you want to audit a city yourself.
Does a bigger city always win?
No. Factors are scored on percentile rank, not raw counts, and the curve gives diminishing returns at the top end — so a smaller city with a dense, distinctive scene can out-score a large city that is merely big. Several do.
How do you handle ties in the ranking?
Honestly. Because the final calibration clamps and rounds to an integer in 0–100, two or more cities can land on the same Fun Score. When that happens, every ranked surface — homepage, city page, state and pillar leaderboards — tags the rank with a T prefix (T#1, T-1st) and a short tail like "tied with 6 other cities". The rank is computed as 1 plus the count of cities with a strictly higher score, so co-leaders share #1 instead of one being arbitrarily promoted. See tied rank on the glossary or the methodology for the calibration detail.
How does this differ from Walk Score, AreaVibes or Niche?
CityFunIndex scores a different question. Walk Score measures walkability, Niche scores K-12 schools and demographic livability, AreaVibes blends seven livability categories — all useful, none really answering what there is to actually do here on a free weekend. CityFunIndex measures recreational quality across 23 factors (1 to 10 in the other indexes), every weight is published on the methodology page, and every score is re-weightable in your browser. The full side-by-side comparison lives on the methodology page.
Using the index
Ranking, comparing and finding cities on the site.
Can I rank cities by what I care about?
Yes. The personalize page lets you slide all 23 factors to your own taste — crank up live music, drop traffic — and every city re-ranks instantly in your browser.
Can I compare specific cities side by side?
Yes. The compare page puts up to four cities head to head across all 23 factors at once, with the leading city on each factor highlighted.
Why isn’t my city listed?
The index currently scores 134 US cities — the largest metros plus a curated set of notable smaller places. If a city you expected is missing, it is queued for a future expansion, not excluded.
Data & the API
How fresh the data is and how you can build with it.
Is the data real right now?
Yes. The live pipeline is running and every published Fun Score is a real measurement. Each city and leaderboard page carries a freshness chip showing the exact date the score was last computed and the algorithm version that produced it. Every one of the 23 factors is now scoring from real data — no factor is held out of the leaderboards.
What happens if a single city is missing data for a single factor?
Every one of the 23 factors carries a live data feed across the published city set — no factor as a whole is held out. Per-cell gaps are still possible (one city, one factor, one missing observation — for example a Census place that the fetcher's coverage map does not yet include), and when that happens the recompute fills just that cell with the §6.5 placeholder (the median value of 50) so the city still gets a composite Fun Score. The placeholder is disclosed in the per-city API payload (score=50, with the `thin` flag set on the zero measurement — the raw measured value itself is withheld from the public payload and reserved for the paid Data plan) and, on the city page, the affected pillar carries a "Limited data" badge so a reader can tell the city sat at the bottom of the distribution by default rather than from a low measurement. If a future fetcher rotation ever held a whole factor out, this question would name the factor and link the deferred pillar definition — today none qualify.
How often will scores update?
Every signal refreshes on the cadence that suits it: the slowest feeds (street maps, points of interest, transit networks, air quality, weather) refresh quarterly; medium signals like crime and news attention refresh monthly; live event listings refresh weekly. The recompute then re-runs the algorithm against whatever is fresh.A given city’s score moves a few times a year in practice. We avoid daily churn on purpose — a quality-of-life index should reflect what a city is actually like, not Tuesday’s air-quality snapshot.
Is CityFunIndex free? Can cities pay to rank higher?
It is free to browse, and no — cities cannot pay for placement. Rankings come from the data alone, and the methodology is public so anyone can check.
Can I use the Fun Score data in my own product?
Yes. Every score and all 23 factor scores are available through the licensed data API — metered one call per city record and gated behind a paid API key. Any city’s score can be dropped onto a page with a copy-paste embed badge, for evaluation and non-commercial use. Building the data into a commercial product runs on a paid plan, priced by the scope of your deployment — the pricing page has the tiers, and the business page covers badge embedding and full dataset licensing.