PlainCities publishes a profile for every incorporated place the U.S. Census Bureau tracks — more than 28,000 cities and towns — built entirely from official federal data. This page explains how those pages are produced, what standards they are held to, and how to report a number that looks wrong so we can fix it at the source.

How these pages are produced

Every population count, median income, home value, crime rate, and climate figure on PlainCities originates in an official government dataset. We download the raw data files and pull the public APIs, load them through a documented, version-controlled data pipeline, and render them into city, neighborhood, and state pages using shared templates. No city page is hand-written, and no figure is typed in by an editor. Each value you see is read directly from the official source record at build time.

Our editorial team is responsible for the parts a pipeline cannot decide on its own: which datasets to use, how each metric is defined and labeled, what the methodology says, how derived measures (such as a national income percentile or a cost-of-living comparison) are computed, which guides and explainers we write, and what we will not publish. The pipeline then applies those decisions uniformly across every city, so the rule that governs one page governs all of them.

Sourcing standards

We publish only data that comes from official government sources, and we name the source on every page. Our data is:

• U.S. Census Bureau — American Community Survey (ACS): the source for population, median household income, median home value, median rent, poverty rate, educational attainment, and median age. Five-year ACS estimates cover places of every size, including small towns.
• FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR): reported violent and property crime counts from participating local agencies, used to derive per-capita crime rates where coverage allows.
• NOAA: climate normals — average temperature, precipitation, and snowfall — for the weather context on each city page.
• National Center for Education Statistics (NCES): public-school counts used as a schooling-availability signal.
• Census Building Permits Survey: residential building-permit activity, a leading indicator of local housing growth.

We do not scrape third-party listing or review sites, we do not republish self-reported ratings as our own, and we do not assign our own livability or safety scores. Where a figure is derived from the official data (for example, a national income percentile or a combined cost-of-living index), the page links to our methodology, which sets out exactly how it is calculated.

Accuracy and validation

Because the numbers are read straight from federal files, the most common limitation is the underlying data itself rather than a transcription error. ACS figures for small places carry wide margins of error; crime reporting is voluntary and incomplete for some agencies; and not every metric is published for every place. Our pipeline applies systematic checks before a value is published: it shows a value as unavailable when the source omits it (never treating a suppressed figure as a zero), labels each metric by what it actually measures, and reconciles city, county, and state rollups so the same figure is consistent wherever it appears.

When we find that a displayed number is wrong, we fix the cause, not the symptom. We trace the value back to the data layer, correct the derivation or labeling rule there, and regenerate the affected pages, so the same class of error is resolved everywhere at once rather than patched on a single page.

Editorial independence

PlainCities does not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from any city, real estate company, or organization in exchange for how a place is presented. We do not assign our own ratings or endorsements. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense. Advertisers have no influence over which cities we cover, how any figure is reported, or how any page ranks.

Update schedule

The Census Bureau, FBI, NOAA, and NCES publish new releases on their own annual or rolling schedules. We refresh our database periodically from the latest official exports and re-stamp the affected pages so the published date reflects when the data genuinely changed, rather than when the page was last served.

Corrections process

If a figure looks wrong, please tell us. We treat data-error reports as a priority and follow the same process every time:

1. Report. Use our contact page with the page URL and the figure you are questioning.
2. Verify. We check the value against the official source record for that place.
3. Fix at the source. If the figure is wrong on our side, we correct the underlying data or derivation rule and regenerate every page it affects.
4. Note it. If the figure is correct but reflects a known limitation — a wide ACS margin of error, incomplete crime reporting, or a suppressed small-area estimate — we explain the caveat rather than silently changing it.

Some apparent errors trace back to the official record itself. When that is the case, we will tell you so and, where possible, point you to the original Census data portal so you can verify it directly.

Contact

Questions about our standards, methodology, or a specific figure are welcome through our contact page. For more on what the data covers and how it is processed, see our About page and methodology. For how to use this information responsibly when comparing places, see our disclaimer.