IllinoisIL

How to read the Illinois profile without drowning in rankings

Illinois has 271 cities tracked on Areazine with populations of 10,000 or more, representing roughly 11,378,430 residents inside those city boundaries. The state-wide average of city median incomes is $92,752, and the average median home value across those cities is $290,962. These aggregate numbers are the first thing most readers want but also the easiest to mis-interpret, they are simple averages of city medians, not population-weighted, so a single high-income small city pulls the state aggregate up the same as a high-income large city would. For statewide policy or market-sizing work, use the per-city ranking tables below; for a quick comparative benchmark against other states, the aggregates are good enough.

FBI UCR data for Illinois (2022) records a violent crime rate of 294 per 100k residents and a property crime rate of 1838 per 100k, with an assault rate of 166 and burglary rate of 220. The critical note on crime data at this level: the FBI publishes per-state totals reliably, but per-city crime reporting is voluntary and incomplete, some of the cities listed below may not appear in the "safest cities" ranking simply because their agency did not submit to UCR that year, not because they are unsafe. Always read the absence of a city as "data unavailable" rather than "data unremarkable." When an agency does submit, smaller-city rates swing dramatically year to year because a handful of incidents move the per-100k figure sharply.

The ranking cards further down organize the same underlying data through different ordering, largest, highest income, most affordable, most educated, fastest growing. Use them as lenses, not as scoreboards: a "Most Affordable" ranking sorted by median home value tells you something very different from one sorted by rent or by price-to-income. Each linked ranking page shows exactly which field it sorts by and in which direction, so the comparison stays honest across lenses.