How to Compare Illinois Towns Before You Move

Choosing the right town is one of the biggest decisions you'll make. Here's how to do it with real data instead of gut feelings.

You've narrowed your search to a handful of Illinois towns. They all look nice on Zillow. The schools seem fine. But how do those towns actually compare on the things that affect your daily life and your wallet?

Property tax rates can vary by 3-4 percentage points between neighboring towns. That difference on a $350,000 home is thousands of dollars a year. School proficiency rates swing by 20+ points across districts that share a border. Crime rates, pension health, job access, commute times, environmental risk. It all matters, and it's all public data.

The problem is that this data is scattered across a dozen government websites, buried in PDFs, and published with zero context. Nobody has time to download Excel files from the Illinois Department of Revenue, cross-reference ISBE report cards, and pull crime stats from I-UCR.

MyTownView puts it all in one place. Start with the free town pages to research each candidate, then use the Dashboard tools to compare them head to head.

Step 1: Research Each Town for Free

Every town on MyTownView has a detailed public page you can browse without an account. Pick any town from our directory and you'll find:

Government — Meeting agendas, minutes, and AI-generated summaries with timestamped transcripts. See exactly what your future town board is discussing.
Finances — Municipal budget trends, sales tax revenue, property tax breakdowns by taxing district, TIF districts, and pension fund health. All sourced from the Illinois Comptroller and Department of Revenue.
Safety — Monthly crime statistics from the Illinois Uniform Crime Reporting system, broken down by offense type: theft, burglary, assault, DUI, drug offenses, and more.
Education — School district report cards from ISBE: enrollment, ELA and Math proficiency by grade, graduation rates, per-pupil spending, teacher salaries, and funding adequacy.
Demographics — Census data on population, median income, poverty rate, education attainment, housing, commute patterns, and workforce.
Business — Professional licenses, liquor and gaming licenses, building permit trends, and employment data by industry.
Environment — EPA data on drinking water systems, Superfund sites, toxic release facilities, underground storage tanks, and brownfield sites.
Community — Upcoming events from municipal calendars and partner organizations.

This is real, sourced data pulled from state and federal agencies. Not user reviews, not vibes. You can spend an evening reading through a town's finances, school performance, and crime trends and walk away with a genuine understanding of the community.

For a lot of people, this is enough. You can research three or four towns individually and make a confident decision.

Step 2: Compare Towns Side by Side

When you're ready to put your top candidates next to each other, the Dashboard takes your research further.

The Compare tool lets you pick up to five towns and see them side by side across 100+ metrics. Every data point from the free town pages, organized into a single comparison view with color-coded rankings so you can instantly see which town leads in each category.

Here's what the comparison covers:

Property Taxes

The composite rate is just the start. We break it down by every taxing district: village, school, park, library, fire, sanitary. You can see exactly which districts are driving your tax bill. We also show estimated annual and monthly payments for a median-valued home, so you can compare in real dollars.

Schools

If you have kids (or plan to), this is probably the deciding factor:

ELA and Math proficiency rates by grade level
Graduation rates and chronic absenteeism
Per-pupil spending broken down by category (instruction, admin, support, transportation)
Teacher salaries, retention, and student-teacher ratios
Evidence-Based Funding tiers and adequacy gaps

Safety

Crimes per 1,000 residents, normalized for population so you can fairly compare a town of 5,000 to a town of 50,000. Drill into specific offense types to see what's actually happening, not just a single "crime score."

Municipal Finances

Is your prospective town running a surplus or a deficit? How much revenue does it collect per capita? We pull from the Illinois Comptroller's Annual Financial Reports going back to 2001, so you can see long-term fiscal patterns, not just a single snapshot.

Pensions

This one matters more than most people realize. Police and fire pension funds in Illinois are funded at the municipal level. A town with severely underfunded pensions faces rising contribution costs that crowd out other services or push property taxes higher. We show funded ratios, unfunded liability, and contribution trends.

Demographics, Economy, and Environment

Median income, homeownership rate, commute time, unemployment, population growth, total jobs, business diversity, environmental contamination sites. The full picture.

Step 3: Discover Towns You Might Have Missed

The Rankings table shows every municipality on the platform, sortable by any metric. Looking for the lowest property tax rate in DuPage County? Sort by composite rate. Want the safest town within 15 miles of your office? Filter by distance and sort by crime rate. Want the best school district in your price range? Sort by math proficiency and cross-reference median home values.

This is where people often find their best option: a town they hadn't considered because they didn't know it existed or never thought to look at the numbers.

Step 4: Get the Quick Summary

The Scorecard distills everything into two composite scores for any town:

Fiscal Health (0-100) — pension health, budget balance, revenue capacity, tax burden, and revenue growth.
Quality of Life (0-100) — safety, education, income, housing, and environment.

Each score is ranked against a peer group (all towns, same county, or within a set distance), so you can see where a town stands relative to its neighbors.

Free Data + Paid Analytics

The town pages are completely free. Browse 647+ municipalities across 31+ Illinois counties, no account required. Every town gets the same depth of coverage, pulling from the same state and federal data sources, updated automatically.

The Dashboard tools (Compare, Rankings, Scorecard, Trends, Reports) are available with a 14-day free trial. If you're actively house hunting, two weeks is plenty of time to compare your shortlist and make a decision.

Start Your Research

Browse towns at mytownview.com/states — explore the free data for any town
Dig into the details — finances, schools, crime, pensions, environment
Start a trial to unlock Compare, Rankings, and Scorecard
Find your town with confidence

Moving is stressful enough. At least the research part can be straightforward.