The World Council on City Data (WCCD) awarded the City of Melbourne a platinum designation for its compliance with ISO 37120 (http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail?csnumber=62436), the world’s first international standard for city indicators. Reporting to the standard allows cities to compare their service delivery and quality of life to other cities globally. The City of Melbourne was one on 20 cities to, globally to help pilot this program and is one of sixteen cities to receive the highest level of accreditation (platinum). \r
Having an international standard methodology to measure city performance allows the City of Melbourne to share data about practices in service delivery, learn from other global cities, rank its results relative to those cities, and address common challenges through more informed decision making. \r
Indicators include: Fire and emergency response; Governance; Health; Recreation; Safety; Shelter; Solid Waste; Telecommunications and Innovation; Transportation; Urban Planning; Wastewater; Water and Sanitation; Economy; Education; Energy; Environment; and Finance.\r
City of Melbourne also submitted an application for accreditation, on behalf of ‘Greater Melbourne’, to the World Council on City Data and this resulted in an ‘Aspirational’ accreditation awarded to wider Melbourne. \r
A summary of Melbourne's results is available here (http://open.dataforcities.org/). Visit the World Council on City Data’s Open Data Portal to compare our results to other cities from around the world.

Japan's capital, Tokyo, was considered the leading city in quality of life among cities in the Asia-Pacific region in 2025, with an index score of *****. This was followed by Pune, India, with a quality of life index of ***** that year.

Quality of life is a measure of comfort, health, and happiness by a person or a group of people. Quality of life is determined by both material factors, such as income and housing, and broader considerations like health, education, and freedom. Each year, US & World News releases its “Best States to Live in” report, which ranks states on the quality of life each state provides its residents. In order to determine rankings, U.S. News & World Report considers a wide range of factors, including healthcare, education, economy, infrastructure, opportunity, fiscal stability, crime and corrections, and the natural environment. More information on these categories and what is measured in each can be found below:

Healthcare includes access, quality, and affordability of healthcare, as well as health measurements, such as obesity rates and rates of smoking. Education measures how well public schools perform in terms of testing and graduation rates, as well as tuition costs associated with higher education and college debt load. Economy looks at GDP growth, migration to the state, and new business. Infrastructure includes transportation availability, road quality, communications, and internet access. Opportunity includes poverty rates, cost of living, housing costs and gender and racial equality. Fiscal Stability considers the health of the government's finances, including how well the state balances its budget. Crime and Corrections ranks a state’s public safety and measures prison systems and their populations. Natural Environment looks at the quality of air and water and exposure to pollution.

This dataset shows Qatar’s score and ranking in the Quality of Life Index. The index uses an empirical formula that incorporates the following factors: purchasing power (higher is better), pollution (lower is better), house price-to-income ratio (lower is better), cost of living (lower is better), safety (higher is better), healthcare (higher is better), traffic commute time (lower is better), and climate (higher is better).

Overall quality of life is a composite assessment of the quality of the social, economic and physical environments. Eleven domains (or aspects of life) have been used to assess the external conditions of overall quality of life. The eleven domains were categorized into the three environments of overall quality of life. The quality of each domain was assessed by several indicators, which were then combined to create a quality of life index. Domains are defined as the important aspects of life important to overall quality of life. This map shows the overall quality of life, representing the combined attributes of the physical, social and economic environments.

According to a report on Chinese cities from 2024 that provided a ranking of their cultural vitality and quality of life, Shanghai led the list with a total composite score of ***. Beijing and Hangzhou came in second and third. The overall city ranking, which comprised ten subsets, was headed by China's capital Beijing.

In 2023, the highest levels of quality of life in Denmark was found in small towns with **************** inhabitants. Quality of life levels in Denmark decreased from 2018 to 2023, which must be seen in relation with the COVID-19 pandemic and the rising inflation rates.

This survey was conducted in January 2004 to measure the local perceptions of quality of life in 31 European cities. The first part presents and comments eight graphs1 on issues for which the residents in the 31 cities had widely diverging opinions: (1) employment opportunities, (2) housing costs, (3) safety, (4) cleanliness of cities, (5) public transport, (6) air pollution, (7) integration of immigrants and (8) overall satisfaction with the quality of life of their city. The annex presents all the results in a table format for all 22 questions in the survey.

The results by volumes are distributed as follows:

• Volume A: Countries
• Volume AA: Groups of countries
• Volume A' (AP): Trends
• Volume AA' (AAP): Trends of groups of countries
• Volume B: EU/socio-demographics
• Volume B' (BP) : Trends of EU/ socio-demographics
• Volume C: Country/socio-demographics ---- Researchers may also contact GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences: https://www.gesis.org/eurobarometer

Quality of Life Index (higher is better) is an estimation of overall quality of life by using an empirical formula which takes into account purchasing power index (higher is better), pollution index (lower is better), house price to income ratio (lower is better), cost of living index (lower is better), safety index (higher is better), health care index (higher is better), traffic commute time index (lower is better) and climate index (higher is better).

Current formula (written in Java programming language):

index.main = Math.max(0, 100 + purchasingPowerInclRentIndex / 2.5 - (housePriceToIncomeRatio * 1.0) - costOfLivingIndex / 10 + safetyIndex / 2.0 + healthIndex / 2.5 - trafficTimeIndex / 2.0 - pollutionIndex * 2.0 / 3.0 + climateIndex / 3.0);

For details how purchasing power (including rent) index, pollution index, property price to income ratios, cost of living index, safety index, climate index, health index and traffic index are calculated please look up their respective pages.

Formulas used in the past

Formula used between June 2017 and Decembar 2017

We decided to decrease weight from costOfLivingIndex in this formula:

index.main = Math.max(0, 100 + purchasingPowerInclRentIndex / 2.5 - (housePriceToIncomeRatio * 1.0) - costOfLivingIndex / 5 + safetyIndex / 2.0 + healthIndex / 2.5 - trafficTimeIndex / 2.0 - pollutionIndex * 2.0 / 3.0 + climateIndex / 3.0);

The World Happiness 2017, which ranks 155 countries by their happiness levels, was released at the United Nations at an event celebrating International Day of Happiness on March 20th. The report continues to gain global recognition as governments, organizations and civil society increasingly use happiness indicators to inform their policy-making decisions. Leading experts across fields – economics, psychology, survey analysis, national statistics, health, public policy and more – describe how measurements of well-being can be used effectively to assess the progress of nations. The reports review the state of happiness in the world today and show how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness.

The scores are based on answers to the main life evaluation question asked in the poll. This question, known as the Cantril ladder, asks respondents to think of a ladder with the best possible life for them being a 10 and the worst possible life being a 0 and to rate their own current lives on that scale. The scores are from nationally representative samples for 2017 and use the Gallup weights to make the estimates representative. The columns following the happiness score estimate the extent to which each of six factors – economic production, social support, life expectancy, freedom, absence of corruption, and generosity – contribute to making life evaluations higher in each country than they are in Dystopia, a hypothetical country that has values equal to the world’s lowest national averages for each of the six factors. They have no impact on the total score reported for each country, but they do explain why some countries rank higher than others.

Quality of life index, link: https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/indices_explained.jsp

Happiness store, link: https://www.kaggle.com/unsdsn/world-happiness/home

This dataset is used to carry out the analyses in the article: Pazos-García, María J.; López-López, V.; Iglesias-Antelo, S.; Vila-Vázquez, G. Quality of life in cities: An outcome and a resource? European Research on Management and Business Economics, 2024, 31(1), DOI: 10.1016/j.iedeen.2024.100264

Abstract

This dataset is from the Gauteng City-Region Observatory which is a partnership between the University of Johannesburg, the University of the Witwatersrand, the Gauteng Provincial Government and several Gauteng municipalities. The GCRO has conducted previous Quality of Life Surveys in 2009 (Round 1), 2011 (Round 2), 2013-2014 (Round 3) and 2015-2016 (Round 4), and 2017-2018 (Round 5). Round 6 was conducted in 2020-2021 and is the latest round of the survey.

Geographic coverage

The survey covers the Gauteng province in South Africa.

Analysis unit

Households and individuals

Universe

The survey covers all adult residence in Gauteng province, South Africa.

Kind of data

Sample survey data [ssd]

Mode of data collection

Face-to-face [f2f]

Statistics on NYC quality of life

Context

Movehub city ranking as published on http://www.movehub.com/city-rankings

Content

movehubqualityoflife.csv

Cities ranked by
Movehub Rating: A combination of all scores for an overall rating for a city or country.
Purchase Power: This compares the average cost of living with the average local wage.
Health Care: Compiled from how citizens feel about their access to healthcare, and its quality.
Pollution: Low is good. A score of how polluted people find a city, includes air, water and noise pollution.
Quality of Life: A balance of healthcare, pollution, purchase power, crime rate to give an overall quality of life score.
Crime Rating: Low is good. The lower the score the safer people feel in this city.

movehubcostofliving.csv

Unit: GBP
City
Cappuccino
Cinema
Wine
Gasoline
Avg Rent
Avg Disposable Income

cities.csv

Cities to countries as parsed from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and_cities_with_100,000_or_more_inhabitants/cityname:_A (A-Z)

Acknowledgements

Movehub

http://www.movehub.com/city-rankings

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and_cities_with_100,000_or_more_inhabitants/cityname:_A

This operations dashboard shows historic and current data related to this performance measure.The performance measure dashboard is available at 3.36 Quality of City Services. Data Dictionary

The city with the lowest quality of life is Harare. Harare leads the ranking with a value of ****.

Survey conducted among the Panel of inhabitants of Besançon on their perception of the quality of life and quality of city

Luxembourg stands out as the European leader in quality of life for 2025, achieving a score of 220 on the Quality of Life Index. The Netherlands follows closely behind with 211 points, while Albania and Ukraine rank at the bottom with scores of 104 and 115 respectively. This index provides a thorough assessment of living conditions across Europe, reflecting various factors that shape the overall well-being of populations and extending beyond purely economic metrics. Understanding the quality of life index The quality of life index is a multifaceted measure that incorporates factors such as purchasing power, pollution levels, housing affordability, cost of living, safety, healthcare quality, traffic conditions, and climate, to measure the overall quality of life of a Country. Higher overall index scores indicate better living conditions. However, in subindexes such as pollution, cost of living, and traffic commute time, lower values correspond to improved quality of life. Challenges affecting life satisfaction Despite the fact that European countries register high levels of life quality by for example leading the ranking of happiest countries in the world, life satisfaction across the European Union has been on a downward trend since 2018. The EU's overall life satisfaction score dropped from 7.3 out of 10 in 2018 to 7.1 in 2022. This decline can be attributed to various factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic and economic challenges such as high inflation. Rising housing costs, in particular, have emerged as a critical concern, significantly affecting quality of life. This issue has played a central role in shaping voter priorities for the European Parliamentary Elections in 2024 and becoming one of the most pressing challenges for Europeans, profoundly influencing both daily experiences and long-term well-being.

Key quality of life indicators - housing costs, arts.

The table summarises the results of the survey on the quality of life in the large cities of Latvia — Daugavpils, Jelgava, Jekabpils, Jurmala, Liepaja, Rezekne, Valmiera and Ventspils. During the survey, citizens were asked about their satisfaction with the quality of public services (health, education), employment, daily movement habits and living conditions in general. In 2017, the survey was carried out as part of the European Commission-funded grant “Data collection for sub-national statistics (mainly cities)”.

The physical environment represents the external conditions under which we live. This map shows the quality of the physical environment: the environment in which people live. It includes aspects of access to services, security and safety, and environmental conditions pertaining to air quality and housing. Eight indicators have been used to assess aspects of the quality of the physical environment.