Editorial policy

Every figure comes from a public US government source: the Bureau of Labor Statistics, HUD, the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the FCC, FMCSA, the IRS and the state and local tax agencies. Every page names its sources at the foot of the page, under Sources and method, and the About page explains how they are combined.

When an agency doesn’t publish a figure for a place or a job, the page says “Not published”. We never fill a gap with an estimate of our own.

Some pages can link to partners, such as moving-quote services and internet providers, and we may earn a commission when you use those links. Partners never change our listings, the order they appear in, or any figure. Movers are listed from federal records by our own rule, insured movers first and then larger fleets; internet providers by the share of homes they report covering to the FCC, with satellite-only providers last.

Some state pages carry a short written introduction and a few paragraphs about the state. Each one is written from a fact sheet of public sources, such as the National Archives, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and NOAA, where every fact is recorded with its link and the date it was checked.

• Every sentence is matched to a fact on the sheet before the text is published.
• Nothing may contradict the page’s own figures, and the text doesn’t repeat numbers that change with each data update.
• Automatic checks catch repeated or templated sentences, stock phrases and superlatives that no fact backs.
• A text goes live only after a review; until then it is a draft that never appears on the site.

If a figure looks wrong, email hello@citytown.info with the page address. We check it against the original source; when the error is ours we correct the data and rebuild the page, which then shows its new “Data compiled” date at the foot of the page.

We refresh each source when it publishes new data.