Round Rock ranks among Best Places to Live


Round Rock ranks as the 25th Best Place Live in the United States, according to Money’s Best Places to Live ranking for 2021-2022.

Here’s what the publication had to say about why Round Rock made the list:

Round Rock takes the No. 1 spot on our list for projected job growth through 2025. Savings on taxes may be, in part, why: Not only does Texas not charge corporate or personal income tax, but Round Rock itself also boasts low property taxes and tax breaks for businesses.

In addition to containing Dell’s headquarters and a bevy of rapidly expanding housing options, the city offers robust education opportunities. Round Rock has eight International Baccalaureate (IB) schools as well as regional campuses for colleges like Texas State University. After school, you’ll find teenagers packed around the wooden tables at Hoody’s, chowing down on cheesesteaks. 

Methodology

Money considered cities and towns with populations ranging from 25,000 up to 500,000. This range allowed for the surfacing of places large enough to have amenities like grocery stores and a nearby hospital, but kept the focus on somewhat lesser known spots around the United States. The largest place on the list this year has over 457,476 residents and the smallest has 25,260.

Money also removed places where:

  • the crime risk is more than 1.5x the national average
  • the median income level is lower than its state’s median
  • the population is declining
  • there is effectively no ethnic diversity 

This yielded a candidate list of about 1,300 locations. 

To whittle that down to the 50 best, Money looked at nearly 100 different metrics (for a total of over 300,000 unique data points) organized into nine categories: 

  • Cost of Living 
  • Economic opportunity
  • Diversity 
  • Education 
  • Fun (aka amenities) 
  • Health & safety 
  • Housing market
  • Income & personal finances 
  • Quality of life

To meet the goal of highlighting places people can actually afford to live, Money put extra weight on cost of living, economic opportunity and housing affordability. To keep the list interesting, it limited winners to three per state and one per county. Last year’s top five places were also disqualified. 

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