NJ's Best Towns for Families 2015 – Methodology

To come up with our first 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), crime rates (NJ Department of Law and Public Safety), public school district rankings (Great Schools), median household income (US Census), percentage of families with children under the age of 18 (US Census), mean travel time to work (US Census), number of restaurants (Yelp), number of hospitals within 10 miles (Health Grades) and number of grocery/convenience stores within 5 miles (Yelp). Based on the aggregated data for each of the municipalities, we developed an algorithm to determine our ranking.