Morrisville Ranks in Top 20 Towns to Live Nationwide

Morrisville, NC – In a new ranking of cities and towns nationwide, Morrisville is in the top 20 best places to live. While Morrisville is still ranked as the best place to live in North Carolina, it fell from its higher national spot in 2017.

19th in the Nation

In Niche’s ranking of the best places to live for 2018, Morrisville ranks 19th in the country, with particularly high scores for its public schools, jobs and whether it is “good for families,” which combines data on schools, safety and the percentage of other families in the town.

While Morrisville has ranked highly, this is down from their 2017 ranking of fifth best in the nation. In last year’s rankings, Morrisville scored an A+ for diversity but was only given an A in the 2018 report. In this study, diversity is both ethnic and economic diversity. This is still better or equal to the diversity rankings for most of the top 20 municipalities in the report.

Morrisville also ranked as the best place to live in North Carolina in this report, as it did in the 2017 study. And like last year, Cary came in second although Apex is now ranked third when Chapel Hill had that spot last year. Cary also came in 76th in the nation, down from 69th in the 2017 study.

Other Morrisville Factors

The Niche study weighed public schools, percentage of higher education, crime and housing the most heavily. Housing includes cost of living and general home values. Morrisville got a B score for the cost of living and an A for housing. The Niche study puts median rent in Morrisville at $1,146 and median home values at around $290,000. While several of the high ranking municipalities have higher home values, few score better than Morrisville for cost of living.

Morrisville is also given a B for safety, but so is Cary, which is one of the safest towns in the country according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report. The Niche study looks at crimes per 100,000 people to account for population but does not round it further. However, the top ranking town in the study – Carmel, Indiana – has nearly four times the population of Morrisville and had 19 violent crimes last year compared to Morrisville’s 66.

Story by staff reports. Photos by Hal Goodtree. Morrisville content sponsored in part by the Morrisville Chamber of Commerce.