Lifestyle brings together several independent measures that can help you understand everyday life in a destination. These include walkability, transit and errands, and internet performance. Each measure has its own evidence, method, coverage, and limitations.
Retirement Lists does not combine these measures into an overall Lifestyle score. A destination may perform well in one area and poorly in another, so each result should be considered separately.
Why there is no overall Lifestyle measure
A planned overall Lifestyle measure has no usable coverage. Across the 987 destinations, 623 are model-limited and 364 are source-unavailable.
Because there is no dependable destination-level coverage, the overall measure is not published, ranked, displayed, or used when calculating Fit. Retirement Lists does not substitute assumptions, nearby-city values, or partial research to fill this gap.
How to use these measures
Use each Lifestyle measure for the question it can answer:
| Measure | What it helps you evaluate |
|---|---|
| Walkability | How practical it may be to reach everyday destinations on foot |
| Transit and errands | What official transportation evidence says about commuting, vehicle access, and local mobility |
| Internet | Recent fixed-broadband download performance measured near the destination |
| Recreation | Not published as a comparable destination measure |
These measures should not be added together or treated as interchangeable. Walkability, transportation behavior, internet performance, and recreation describe different parts of daily life.
Coverage and limitations
Coverage differs by measure and country. Some transportation evidence comes from national census tables, while internet performance comes from standardized test observations. Each methodology page explains its own geographic unit, date, calculation, and limitations.
Recreation on Retirement Lists is a sourced, qualitative overview of a city’s outdoor setting, cultural character, food, activities, and visitor access. It does not count amenities, calculate a recreation score, or compare cities quantitatively.
Validated Recreation research is available for 772 of the 987 catalog cities. The other 215 cities remain unavailable. All available information is display-only and cannot influence filters, sorting, rankings or collections, Fit, Compare, or hard constraints.
Sources and review
Last reviewed August 1, 2026
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: National Walkability Index
EPA National Walkability Index evidence used for the separate Walkability methodology.
- U.S. Census Bureau: ACS 2024 table B08301
Means of transportation to work context used by the separate Transit and Errands methodology.
- Speedtest by Ookla Global Fixed and Mobile Network Performance Maps
Recent fixed-broadband performance observations used by the separate Internet methodology.