Which Idaho city secured top spot in study ranking best places for working families?
Fifty-six percent of working parents report difficulty balancing work and family, according to the Pew Research Center.
Additionally, parents reported finding more enjoyment in parenting when they have good work-life balance. But that can be hard to achieve when considering rising expenses, long working hours, child care and commutes.
So where is that balance most achievable?
According to one study, that’s Boise.
A recent study considered those things, pulling data from the 100 most populous cities in the U.S. and ranking the 25 best for working families.
“We were kind of interested to see what actually makes your life easier as a dual-income household,” said Lucy Georgiades in an interview. She is the co-founder of Elevate, which conducted the study.
“What are the things that impact people’s quality of life and how they can kind of cope with juggling the kids and work life and everything else, the other pressures that they’ve got as well. That’s why we’ve put in things like commute times and day-care costs, as well as what percentage of people’s income (day care accounts for).”
The study pulled data across three weighted categories:
Work and home: housing cost index (10%), median family income Index (10%), work from home index (5%), work life balance index (10%), commute travel time index (5%).
Child care: toddler day-care cost index (10%), child-care cost as % of income index (10%), Pre-K-12 ranking index (10%), nanny salary Index (5%).
Environment: walk index (5%), transit index (5%), bike index (5%), park score index (5%), crime rate index (5%).
“When you look at what makes a city work well for these kind of households — cities where you can have work-life balance and they are good for working families — you’ve kind of got to look at all the different pieces,” Georgiades said.
And ranked at No. 1 on the list with an overall score of 76.1 was Boise, several points ahead of Lincoln, Nebraska, in second place.
“We found that Boise really outstripped Lincoln, Nebraska, as the second place because the affordable-housing prices were actually quite good for renting a two-bedroom home,” Georgiades said.
For cities where the cost of renting a two-bedroom home was cheaper than in Boise, the median household income was lower for some. Boise’s higher median income and scores in other categories secured its place at the top.
Other considerations that placed Boise at No. 1 included:
An average work commute of approximately 19 minutes one way, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
A low crime rate. Boise has a lower crime rate than other metros of a similar size, according to Neighborhood Scout data used in the study. Boise’s rate of violent crime was 26.1 per 100,000 people in 2022, lower than the national average.
High walkability and bike scores.
Access to green spaces and outdoor recreational activities.
“When you start doing really deep data analysis on that, you can start to pull very interesting inferences about your population and what they need and what they don’t have, and where some of the holes are,” Georgiades said. “I think it’s important if we do studies like this to help us see where some cities are really falling short and where some cities like Boise are really doing well.”
This story was originally published February 28, 2025 at 4:00 AM.