Sources and licensing
Rankodex publishes 3,054 topics. 3,033 of them come from World Population Review, and 21 are built directly from files published by government agencies and one open dataset. This page lists them and says what you may and may not assume about reusing them.
World Population Review
World Population Review is the compiled source for most of the site. Its rankings, and many of the figures in them, are reproduced from World Population Review’s pages, which in turn cite the primary sources behind each list.
Rankodex keeps the numbers, the column and page titles, those source citations and the date each page was last updated. It does not copy World Population Review’s articles, and it is not affiliated with World Population Review.
Data taken directly from its publishers
These sources are downloaded from their publishers by the data pipeline and turned into topics of their own. Their rows only attach to places the site already has, so they never add places.
American Community Survey 5-year estimates
Median rent, home value and household income, commute time, broadband, poverty and college degrees, for 2020–2024, read from the Census Bureau’s Summary File.
Also used for: Median household income is the divisor of the “share of income” adjustment for states, cities and counties.
Census Geocoder
The metro area and Census place of each US city, looked up from its coordinates, so figures published for metro areas (BEA price levels, BLS wages) and Census places (ACS) reach the right cities.
Regional Price Parities by State and Metro Area
Price levels for all items, goods, housing, utilities and other services (US average = 100). Cities take the value of their metro area.
Also used for: The cost-of-living adjustment of wages and incomes for states and US cities.
Real Personal Income for States
Personal income and consumer spending per person in constant 2017 dollars, adjusted for each state’s price level.
Local Area Unemployment Statistics
Annual average unemployment rates for states and counties.
Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics
Average and median annual wages across all jobs, for states and for metro areas, which each city takes from the metro it is in.
PLACES: Local Data for Better Health
Model-based, age-adjusted shares of adults by county: obesity, diabetes, depression, smoking, binge drinking, sleep, exercise, checkups, health insurance and more.
AirData annual air quality by county
Median and 90th-percentile Air Quality Index, the share of days with good air and the days unhealthy for sensitive groups or worse, for counties with monitors.
Crime in the United States (Crime Data Explorer)
Violent crime, property crime, murder, burglary and vehicle theft per 100,000 people, for states and cities.
nClimDiv climate division data
1991–2020 averages of yearly, January and July temperature, yearly precipitation, and heating and cooling degree days.
World Development Indicators
Yearly country indicators from 2000: GDP per person, growth, inflation, unemployment, inequality, poverty, life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, internet use, electricity access and more.
Also used for: Each country’s price level (GDP per person in dollars over GDP per person at purchasing power parity) drives the cost-of-living adjustment for countries, and GDP per person is the divisor of their “share of income” adjustment.
US County Level Presidential Election Results, 2008–2024
Republican and Democratic vote shares, the margin and the winner of the 2016, 2020 and 2024 presidential elections by county; state results are the sums of their counties.
Public CSV files on GitHub, compiled from news-agency returns. It is not a government source.
How pages credit their sources
- Topic pages name their sources under the title: topics from World Population Review link the page they come from (“Original page”), and the “Sources” list gives the primary sources that page cites, when it cites any, or the dataset a topic was built from. The date the source last updated the figures is shown when the source gives one.
- Comparisons, rankings and place profiles combine statistics from many topics. The compare workbench and place profiles link each statistic to its topic page, which carries its credits.
- Adjusted figures, such as cost of living or share of income, are computed by Rankodex from the sources above; the methodology explains each one.
Licensing and reuse
Rankodex does not grant any licence to third-party data. Figures reproduced from World Population Review, and the primary data behind them, remain subject to their owners’ terms, including World Population Review’s terms of use. Each agency publishes its own terms for its data; check them on the publisher’s site before reusing a dataset.
The site’s source code is open source under the Apache License 2.0. That licence covers the code; it does not extend to the third-party data the site shows or the dataset files built from it.
For crediting Rankodex’s own work, such as its combined rankings, correlations and charts, see the terms of use.