How to Compare Cities Before Moving

List between five and eight criteria that genuinely matter to your household. Common ones: cost of living, housing affordability, job market for your field, safety, climate, transit, schools, proximity to family, and a lifestyle factor (outdoor access, food scene, cultural depth). Resist the urge to list everything — anything you cannot defend at a dinner party does not belong on the list.

Assign each criterion a percentage weight that adds to 100. The exercise of forcing a finite budget reveals what you actually value. If 'cost of living' and 'good schools' each get 25 percent, you are saying they matter equally — verify that statement against your last six months of decisions.

Cast a wide net first: list every city anyone in your household has ever mentioned, plus three or four you have never seriously considered. From that long list, eliminate based on absolute disqualifiers (climate you cannot tolerate, distance from a dependant who cannot move, lack of work in your industry). You should be left with five to eight candidates.

Apply a second filter using a single high-confidence number — most often a cost-of-living maximum or a job-market minimum — to cut the list to three or four cities. These become your scoring set. More than four candidates produces analysis paralysis without improving the decision.

For each criterion, define what a 10 looks like and what a 1 looks like before you start scoring. Anchoring the scale prevents the gradual inflation that creeps into ad-hoc judgements. Use public data where possible: census or statistics bureau for demographics, FBI UCR or local police data for crime, BLS or labour department for jobs, NOAA or meteorological office for climate.

Score each city on each criterion from 1 to 10, multiply by the weight, and sum. The resulting weighted score is not a verdict; it is a discussion starter. Cities that finish within 5 percent of each other are statistically tied and should be split by the in-person visit, not by the spreadsheet.

Anyone moving with you should fill out the weighting exercise independently before comparing notes. Diverging weights are the single largest source of post-move regret, and they are easier to surface in a spreadsheet than in an argument three months after arrival.

Where weights differ, negotiate them explicitly. 'You weighted schools at 30 percent and I weighted it at 5 percent — let's agree on 20 percent and revisit if our youngest's school does not work out' is a productive conversation. Burying the disagreement and letting the move 'sort itself out' rarely ends well.

Visit the top two cities for at least three nights each, in the same season if possible. The job of the visit is not to fall in love; it is to find the reason this city would not work for you. Walk the neighbourhood you would actually live in at 8am, 1pm, and 9pm. Eat at the supermarket-adjacent café, not the tourist one.

Re-score after each visit while the impressions are fresh. Criteria that lost or gained weight in person are the most important update — they reflect lived reality, not desktop research. Many shortlists swap their first and second pick after the visits, and that is exactly what the visit is for.

Set a deadline for the decision and honour it. Open-ended comparisons spawn more comparisons. Once your weighted score, visits, and household alignment all point in the same direction, write down the decision and the reasons in a single paragraph, dated and saved.

That paragraph becomes your defence against the doubt that hits every mover around month three. Re-reading the reasoning you actually used at the moment of decision is the single most reliable cure for buyer's remorse during the transition.