America’s Best Small Towns
Posted: September 30, 2026 | Source: wallethub.comLiving in a small town can have many benefits, especially lower home prices. A two-parent, two-child household in Hanford, California, would need $8,417 per month to cover living expenses, compared with more than twice that amount ($19,275) for the same family in San Francisco. Of course, some small towns are better than others. To identify America’s best small towns, the financial website WalletHub used 45 livability factors to analyze over 1,300 American communities with populations between 25,000 and 100,000. These variables included the number of restaurants per capita, housing costs, and education quality.
And according to WalletHub, the #1 US town to live in is Lexington, Massachusetts, followed by Brookfield, Wisconsin, and Carmel, Indiana.