In 1998, I moved from Topeka, Kansas to Overland Park, Kansas. I was dating my future wife (Teri) at the time and she lived in south OP, which is in Johnson County. I had visited JOCO a few times before that and had been super impressed.

JOCO is a bedroom community for greater Kansas City with a population of about 560,000. It has a lot of money and very little crime. Everything is clean, the streets are wide and the schools are rated among the best in the nation. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize this was a great place to live.

Admittedly, there are no mountains or oceans nearby and if that’s something a person has to have, then JOCO isn’t for them. However, with unemployment low, cost of living relatively low, standard of living high, who wouldn't want to raise a family there?

In my case, I just wanted to be in a place where it felt like there was growth and activity and commerce and production. Johnson County is on the cutting edge for both Kansas City as well as the state of Kansas…

…and so I moved from Topeka and I never regretted it for a single second.

In trying to determine how Johnson County ranks with respect to other parts of the country, I did as I do with practically everything else in the world… I quantified it.

The best site on the internet for analysis of different cities or locations is city-data.com. It’s an incredible site with an exhaustive data base for any city you are interested in. I’m not going to go through the hundred issues that have to do with air quality, political leanings, average marital status or how many hospitals there are per square mile. But, I do want to analyze is how JOCO rates with respect to financial affordability - standard of living.

The simplest way to evaluate that is to take the median household income and divide it by the cost of living. This is a seemingly simple ratio, so I find it hard to understand why nobody else does it. At least I can't find any list using these two variables. I'm calling it the Discretionary Income Index (DII).

For example in Overland Park, the median household income (MHI) is $68.5K and the cost of living (COL) is 88.5 (100 is the national average). Divide 88.5 by 68.5 and you get 1.292. That’s the ratio I’m going to compare with other cities.

I’ve sort of known the answer to how good the COL/MHI is for JOCO because I’ve played around with some of these numbers before, but this time I decided to get serious. I went to city-data.com and looked at 999 cities eventually focusing on every city in the country that was 100,000 or more in population. You might be shocked to know there are 276 cities that large!

I went to each city’s page and logged the average MHI as well as the COL and dumped the data into excel. It did the calculations for me.

What I thought was true… is true. Most of the population in Johnson County is near the top of the nation by this simple yardstick of Cost of Living (COL) divided by Median Household Income (MHI).

Here is the top-10 list. Only Overland Park (174,907) and Olathe (121,962) are big enough to be on the list of 276 cities, but both are in the top-10.

Now, to make it even more impressive, watch what happens if I add the county (Johnson) and the next four largest cities (Shawnee, Lenexa, Leawood and Prairie Village).

Look at Leawood! It’s off the charts! Leawood ($124.2K) actually has the highest median household income of any city I found. The next highest is Frisco, Texas ($102.0K) and Thousand Oaks, California ($100.9K). Both are on the list above.

By simply looking at the median household income and factoring in the cost of living, Johnson County, Kansas is about as rich as anywhere in the country – and maybe even more than anywhere else. The only comparable place I can find is north Dallas which contains Frisco, Plano and McKinney – all on the top-10 list above. The north part of Dallas is more populated than JOCO.

I once heard a person say that North Dallas is Johnson County on steroids. I would buy that description only in that it is an area with a bigger population. Otherwise, JOCO is just as impressive.

Remember, Overland Park and Olathe are two of the 276 cities with 100,000+ populations in the U.S., but both are in the top-10. And, although I’m sure I would add other cities around the country onto a list such as this if I dropped the population requirement all the way down to 21,508 (Prairie Village), you can still see that six cities (including the county as a whole) are among the best in the nation.

Nevertheless, I thought I should at least give an equal nod to North Dallas. So, here are the cities in Johnson County with 21,000 or more population alongside those in North Dallas with 21,000+. I think I got them all. Johnson County is Blue, North Dallas is Red.





For your information, here are the other area cities (among the 276 with 100,000 or more inhabitants) and their rankings.

As if there weren’t many other reasons to live in JOCO, the fact is that it’s a place where people make a lot of money and yet don’t have a lot of expenses. And, that results in a lot more discretionary or disposable income than others have around the country. All the benefits of Johnson County simply come as a result of that discretionary income.

If I had to die - and we all do, I can’t think of a better place to do it!