New Jersey Ranked as 2021 Best State to Live In

According to a recent study by WalletHub, New Jersey ranked as the 2021 Top State to Live. The states were compared using five key metrics including affordability, economy, education and health, quality of life, and safety.

*All data is from WalletHub’s 2021 Best States to Live in report. Click here to read the full report.

WalletHub Methodology

To determine the best and worst states to live in, WalletHub compared the 50 states across five key dimensions: 1) Affordability, 2) Economy, 3) Education & Health, 4) Quality of Life, and 5) Safety.

WalletHub evaluated the key dimensions using 52 relevant metrics. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the most favorable living conditions.

Finally, it determined each state’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its overall score and used the resulting scores to rank-order the states.

Affordability: 49

The affordability score is based on housing affordability, median annual property taxes, cost of living, median annual household income and homeownership rate.

Economy: 32

The economy score is based on recovery from COVID-19, unemployment rate, economic confidence index, population poverty levels, median debt per median earnings, income growth, and more.

Quality of Life: 7

The quality of life score is based on average hours worked per week, average commute time, miles of trails for bicycling and walking, infrastructure, restaurants*, museums*, performing arts centers*, accessibility of beaches per capita*, and more.

Education & Health: 5

The education and health score is based on the quality of the public school system, high school graduation rate, share of the population aged 25 and older with a high school diploma or higher, quality of public hospital system, life expectancy, and more.

Safety: 1

The safety score is based on the violent-crime rate, property-crime rate, trafficrelated fatalities per capita and total law-enforcement employees per capita.

Total Score: 63.01

The total score is based on each state’s weighted average across all metrics.