1. Comparable measures
Values are winsorized at documented bounds, then min-max normalized. Rent uses log normalization to avoid a few expensive cities dominating.
Explainable by design
How the ranking works.
We normalize each available measure across the selected place set, respect whether lower or higher is better, apply your weight, then temper the contribution by evidence confidence.
2. Honest uncertainty
High, medium and low confidence contribute at 1.00, 0.85 and 0.65. Missing values contribute nothing and reduce visible coverage.
3. Rent basis
Asking, new-lease and contract-stock rents are visibly labelled. City results use city rent; country results use rent_1br_national, never selected-city averages.
4. No universal verdict
A score is a transparent preference fit, not a factual declaration that one place is universally best. Editorial city verdicts describe a specific trade-off and always remain subordinate to the underlying evidence.
Education system: national context, not a school ranking
We use the World Bank HCI+ education pillar: schooling from preschool through tertiary education, adjusted for learning outcomes. This is the education component, not the overall human capital index. Its raw scale is 0–188 points, not a percentage.
The 2025 edition includes older underlying observations. We retain a versioned snapshot, updated by the World Bank on 2026-07-13 and retrieved on 2026-09-06. Current conditions, particularly in conflict-affected countries, may differ substantially.
Every city inherits its country's value; this does not establish the quality of local schools. We assign medium confidence to this modelled national proxy. Countries without a comparable value remain unscored, receive no invented zero, and have lower evidence coverage when education matters to you.
The education slider controls importance, starting at 0 to leave the balanced profile unchanged. We normalize available values across your selected places using the existing min-max method and 5th/95th-percentile clipping. Raw values are shown to one decimal. School type, teaching language and distance remain planning-only choices and do not change this national score.
The World Bank: World Development Indicators: Human Capital Project, HCI+ education pillar (2025). Adapted for preference-fit scoring; no World Bank endorsement is implied. CC BY 4.0 and World Bank terms. Read the source methodology.