What matters most to you?

How the deck is built and scored

Three questions set your profile: what matters most to you (taxes, schools, safety, cost of living, climate or politics), the kind of place you want (city, suburbs, small town or rural) and your situation. Every one of the 50 states is then scored against that profile from its own figures. A taxes profile gives full marks to a state with no income tax and fewer as the top rate climbs; a schools profile uses the Education Week K-12 rank; safety uses the FBI violent crime rate; cost of living uses the index where 100 is the national average; climate uses annual sunny days; politics uses the size of the 2024 presidential margin. The setting adds points from the state's urban population share, and the situation adds points for things like exempting Social Security or cheap infant care.

The deck holds eleven cards: the five states that score highest for you, three drawn at random from the middle of the ranking, and three from the bottom, shuffled so you cannot tell which is which. Each card shows the figures behind its score, so a swipe is a judgment on the numbers, and the states you kept are listed at the end as your matches, in the order they came up. State figures were last checked 2026-09-14 (tax rates are tax year 2026); the comparison pages put any two states side by side afterward.