Methodology
To come up with our third annual list, we first eliminated those towns with populations less than 1,500, due to unsubstantial data. For the remaining municipalities, we collected data for average home sale prices (NJ Division of Taxation), violent crime and non-violent crime data  (NJ Department of Law and Public Safety), public high school performance (we specifically looked at the percentage of students at each high school taking AP/IB classes, the percentage of students at each high school scoring above 1550 on the SAT and the percentage of students still in college 18 months after high school graduation)  (NJ Department of Education), median household income (US Census), percentage of families with children under the age of 18 (US Census), mean travel time to work (US Census), percentage of families with less than 70% of one ethnicity to find diverse populations (US Census), number of restaurants (Yelp), number of hospitals within 10 miles (Health Grades), number of grocery/convenience stores within 5 miles (Yelp) and the number of NJ’s Favorite Kids’ Docs (chosen by our readers) who practice in each town. Based on the aggregated data for each of the municipalities, we developed an algorithm to determine our ranking.
See New Jersey’s Best Towns
for Families for 2017
Plus: The Top Town in Every County
See New Jersey’s Best Towns
for Families 2016Â
See New Jersey’s Best Towns
for Families for 2015 list