How TownRatings grades Irish towns

Every grade in the Ireland edition comes from public data, compares a town only with other towns in Ireland, and is turned into a letter the same way. This page explains how, once, so each town page can stay about the town. Northern Ireland’s towns are graded in the UK edition.

Letters Grades by size The overall grade Safety Schools Health Cost of living Jobs & income Walkability Hazard risk The five cities Towns without a grade Limits

From numbers to letters

A town is a CSO Urban Area from Census 2022, the built-up area around a place rather than a council area. For each subject we rank every Irish town with 1,000 or more residents on the public data behind it. A town’s percentile is the share of those towns it does better than. Where a subject has several measures, each is ranked, the ranks are averaged, and the average is ranked again. The percentile becomes a letter on one fixed scale:

D−DC−CC+B−BB+A−AA+

Bottom 5% · then steps of 10% · top 5%. There is no F: a D− town is still a real place where people live and make it work.

Each town also shows its rank within its county, because the national letter and the local picture can differ. A county with fewer than five graded towns gives no county rank.

Which towns get grades

2,500 residents or more: a grade for each subject the data allows, an overall grade, and ranks in Ireland and in the county.
1,000 to 2,499 residents: subject grades, but no overall grade and no rank.
Under 1,000 residents: a page with the town’s figures, and no grades.

Residents means one figure everywhere, the same one every page shows: the town’s population at Census 2022.

The overall grade

Six subjects are graded. The overall grade blends them by weight: cost of living 18, safety 18, health 14, jobs and income 12, walkability 8 and hazard risk 4. The blend is ranked again across Ireland, so an A means the same share of towns everywhere. A town needs 2,500 residents and a grade for each of cost of living, safety, health, jobs and income, and walkability; hazard risk counts where the town has it. A subject a town has no grade for is left out of its blend, and the other subjects’ weights are scaled up to fill it.

Because schools aren’t graded in Ireland, the other subjects carry a little more of the overall grade than in our other editions.

Safety

Incidents recorded by the Garda Síochána (Ireland’s police) in the Garda station area or areas covering the town, from the CSO’s recorded crime by station, averaged over 2023, 2024 and 2025 and counted per 1,000 residents a year; where a town spans station areas, each counts by the share of residents living in it. The grade counts crimes against residents and their homes: violent offences, burglary, and damage to property. Homicide and sexual offences aren’t published by station, and fraud is left out (it has been blank since 2023).

A station that records fewer than 30 incidents a year and under 5 per 1,000 residents gives no grade. Where the station area most residents live in records fewer than 30 a year, or its station is more than 10 km away, the page says the grade is less sure. Town centres draw people from far beyond their residents, and their pages say so: the rate per resident runs higher than residents’ own risk.

Sources: CSO, recorded crime incidents by Garda station (CJA11), 2023 to 2025; CSO Census 2022.

Schools: shown, not graded

Schools are shown on each town’s pages but not graded. Irish law (the Education Act 1998, section 53) keeps school results from being published for comparison, so there is no fair measure to grade them on. The overall grade blends the other six subjects.

Health

Two Census 2022 measures, each allowing for the town’s ages, so a town of retired people isn’t marked down for being old: the share of residents in bad or very bad health, and the share with a disability, each against what Ireland’s rates at each age would give a town with these residents. Both are needed.

In a small town few residents report bad health, so its figure can move by chance; where it could be well above or below its true level, the page says the grade is less sure.

Source: CSO Census 2022, general health and disability by age.

Cost of living

Two measures, each against the median household income of the town’s county: the median price of homes sold in the town (the Property Price Register, 2023 to 2025, where the town had 30 or more sales; otherwise the CSO’s median for its Eircode routing key, which takes in the countryside around it), and a year’s rent (the 2025 standardised average rent for the town where it is published, else its local electoral area, else its county). Both are needed.

County income is used, not the town’s own, so a wealthy town isn’t graded as cheap just because its residents earn a lot. Where a town’s price is its routing key’s, or its rent is the county’s, its page says so.

Sources: Property Services Regulatory Authority, Property Price Register; CSO residential property prices by Eircode routing key (HPA04); RTB and CSO standardised average rents (RIA02), 2025; CSO Geographical Profiles of Income in Ireland.

Jobs and income

Four measures: median household income; the employment rate (residents at work as a share of those aged 15 to 64); the unemployment rate; and the average time to work. Three of the four are needed. The Live Register trend is shown on each page but not graded.

Sources: CSO Census 2022 (principal economic status, travel to work); CSO Geographical Profiles of Income in Ireland.

Walkability

Two measures: the share of residents living within 800 metres of each of four everyday places (a pharmacy, a food shop, a school and a post office), averaged; and the share of commuters who walk, cycle or take the bus or train to work at the 2022 Census, for towns with 200 or more commuters. Both are needed.

Hazard risk

Three measures, weighed equally: the estimated share of homes above the radon reference level, the share of homes on ground of high or moderately high landslide susceptibility, and a flood measure of our own. Lower risk grades higher.

The flood measure is ours, not an agency’s. Ireland’s flood maps aren’t open for reuse, so we measure, from the OPW’s open LiDAR heights, the share of a town’s homes standing low beside a big river, lake, estuary or the sea. It only counts against a town: a low share never lifts its grade, because standing high above the water doesn’t make a town safe from every flood. Towns that LiDAR doesn’t cover well enough are graded on radon and landslides alone, and their pages say so.

Sources: Environmental Protection Agency, radon map; Geological Survey Ireland, landslide susceptibility; Office of Public Works, LiDAR (CC BY 4.0).

Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford

The five cities are split into their neighbourhoods, as Paris is into arrondissements and London into boroughs, and each neighbourhood is graded and ranked as a town. A city’s own page gathers its neighbourhoods; it has no grade of its own and is never ranked.

Towns without a grade

Towns under 2,500 residents get subject grades but no overall grade; under 1,000, no grades at all (see above).
No Safety Grade: where the Garda station covering the town records too few incidents to grade. Without Safety there is no overall grade.
No Walkability Grade: where fewer than 200 residents commute, too few to measure how people get to work. Without it there is no overall grade.
University campus towns, where most residents are students, keep their grades but aren’t ranked against other towns or listed among the best places to live.

What the grades can’t tell you

Bigger places record more crime per resident. Town centres draw people from far beyond their residents, so large towns grade lower on Safety than villages almost everywhere. Each Safety page also compares the town with towns of a similar size.
Official data, as published. We use figures as their agencies publish them and say where each comes from; where a figure is hidden, missing or modelled, the page says so.
How sure we are depends on the town. Small towns have small counts, so their grades can move with a few crimes. Safety and Health pages say where a grade is less sure.
An average isn’t a street. A town’s grade averages neighbourhoods that can differ more than whole towns do.
Grades refresh when the data does. Each page says which years its figures cover.

Contains Central Statistics Office (CSO) data, Census 2022, and Tailte Éireann boundaries (CSO Urban Areas, Small Areas, local electoral areas, constituencies), under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).