Editorial & Corrections Policy

PlainRelocate is a data-first publication by Kiznis Studio. This page explains how our content is produced, where the numbers come from, how we stay independent, and how to flag an error.

How our content is produced

Every metro and state profile, score, and ranking on PlainRelocate is generated programmatically from official federal datasets. The numbers are loaded directly from the source — we do not hand-edit, round, or adjust the underlying figures. When a metric is unavailable at the city or metro level, we fall back to the most granular figure the federal source publishes (often the state average) and label it as such. We never fabricate or extrapolate values.

The explanatory writing on the site — guides, methodology, FAQs, and the short interpretive sentences on each page — exists to help readers understand what the data means. It is written to be accurate to the figures it describes; if the data and the prose ever disagree, the data is correct and the prose is the bug.

Where the data comes from

PlainRelocate draws on public data from nine federal agencies — the Bureau of Economic Analysis (cost of living), Bureau of Labor Statistics (wages), HUD (rents), FBI (crime), NCES (schools), Department of Labor (childcare), EPA (air quality), NOAA (climate), and FEMA (natural hazards) — joined at the metropolitan-statistical-area level, with metro definitions from the U.S. Census Bureau. The full source list, scoring weights, and known limitations are documented on our methodology page.

Independence

We do not accept payment, sponsorship, referral fees, or promoted placement from cities, chambers of commerce, real-estate firms, moving companies, or any entity covered on the site. Our only revenue is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense, and advertisers have no influence over which metros we cover or how they rank. Scores are computed directly from federal data using the disclosed weights.

Corrections

If you spot a figure that misreads its source, a broken calculation, or an out-of-date dataset, we want to fix it. Email hello@plainrelocate.com with the page URL and what looks wrong. Because most figures are computed from upstream data, a correction usually means tracing the value back to the source and re-running the pipeline, then refreshing the affected pages. We update the database as new federal releases become available.

Who is responsible

PlainRelocate is published by Kiznis Studio, an independent data-journalism studio. The team is responsible for the methodology, the explanatory writing, and the corrections process. We are not affiliated with any government agency.