County-level cost-of-living data, written in plain language.

What CostByCounty Is

CostByCounty is a data-journalism site, not a financial-advisory resource. Our purpose is to take county-level cost-of-living statistics published by the U.S. Census Bureau and present them in a form a regular person can actually compare and act on. If you are deciding where to move, evaluating housing affordability in a region you're considering, or just want to know how your county stacks up nationally, this site is built for you.

Every page on the site is built from primary-source datasets: the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates. Each statistic is attributed to its source, and the underlying methodology is published on the methodology page.

Who Runs CostByCounty

CostByCounty is published and edited by Logan Johnson, Founder & Data Editor of the ByCounty Network. Logan is a data engineer and independent publisher who built the automated pipeline that ingests public datasets from the U.S. Census Bureau, CDC, FBI, EPA, and other federal agencies — then transforms them into plain-language reporting that anyone can use.

He designs the methodology for composite scores and rankings across all 13 sites in the network, spot-checks AI-generated narratives for accuracy, and signs off on every published page. Logan is the named editorial owner of this site: published statistics either match the source data or they are corrected.

Logan is not a financial advisor, real-estate professional, or licensed appraiser, and CostByCounty does not present itself as a financial-advisory resource. We do not provide investment advice, mortgage recommendations, or relocation consulting. Our role is the data-editor role — verify the numbers, respect the underlying confidence intervals, and decline to publish anything that strays beyond what the source data supports.

Long-form features and reported pieces, when published, carry a visible byline and — for topics that benefit from subject-matter expertise — a named reviewer credit at the top of the article.

Why I Built CostByCounty

I started CostByCounty after relocating and discovering how wildly living costs vary from one county to the next, even within the same state. The Census Bureau publishes extraordinary data through the American Community Survey, but it is buried in spreadsheets and data portals. I wanted a site where a regular person could see, in 30 seconds, how their county compares on rent, home values, and affordability — with the sources right there on the page. No paywall, no gatekeeping, just public data presented honestly.

That same need shows up in every vertical we cover: property taxes, crime, health, schools, environmental risk. The government already collects this data. Our job is to clean it, verify it, and make it comparable.

How We Decide What to Publish

Two documents govern this site's editorial decisions:

• Editorial Standards — our mission, source policy, AI-usage policy, corrections process, funding disclosure, and update cadence.
• Methodology — the exact data sources, composite-score formula, limitations, and update cadence behind every page.

Both documents carry a "Last reviewed" date and are regenerated when our methodology changes.

Our Relationship to the Data

CostByCounty is independent. We are not affiliated with the U.S. Census Bureau, the Department of Commerce, or any government agency. We use their public datasets under the licenses they publish — for federal works, that is public-domain release. Each county page credits the data source that drives it.

When we link out — for example, to Census data portals or to HUD resources — we link to primary sources, not aggregators.

AI in Our Workflow

Per-county pages include a short narrative summary generated with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) from the same statistics shown on the page. This is a tool for turning a row of numbers into a readable paragraph; it is not the source of any data on the site. The narrative prompt is constrained to forbid causation claims, financial advice, and unsourced inference. The Data Editor reviews the prompt and spot-checks output before publication. When source data is refreshed, narratives are regenerated.

We disclose this clearly because honesty is the right policy — and because Google's policies treat undisclosed AI authorship as a separate problem from AI authorship itself. The fix for AI prose on a data site is not to hide it; the fix is to pair it with a named human editor, a clear methodology, and source-grounded constraints. That is what we do.

Part of the ByCounty Network

CostByCounty is one site in the ByCounty Network — a family of independent data sites covering property taxes, cost of living, income, crime, schools, environmental risk, water quality, weather, and more. Visit CountyScore.com for the network's flagship hub, which combines every vertical's data into a single composite county report.

Contact

For data corrections, source attributions, partnership questions, or press inquiries, write to logan@costbycounty.com. See our editorial standards for the corrections process and timelines.