Boston vs Fort Worth: which should you move to?

Violent Part One offences fell from 3,636 in 2023 to 3,615 in 2024 and 3,409 in 2025 on BPD's own year-end counts, and property offences went 12,777, then 13,354, then 13,120, so the three-year direction is down on both. Homicides moved the other way and are the number people argue about: 36 in 2023, then 24 in 2024, a low the city had not seen in decades, then 31 in 2025. Even at 31 the count sits below the 38.2 five-year average, and BPD reports shootings still more than 30% under that average. All of these are preliminary until UCR coding is complete, and BPD's violent crime definition runs below the FBI's, which recorded 4,138 violent offences in Boston in 2024 against BPD's 3,615.

What the rates cover: Computed: Boston Police Department counted 3,409 Part One violent offences between 1 January and 28 December 2025 (31 homicides, 150 rapes, 760 robberies, 914 domestic aggravated assaults, 1,554 non-domestic aggravated assaults), divided by the 672,973 Vintage 2025 city population. The FBI's 2024 file for Boston gives a higher figure, 4,138 violent offences and 628 per 100k, almost all of the gap in aggravated assault; BPD's counts are its own and are preliminary until UCR coding is complete.

Homicides: City of Boston, 31 homicides in the 1 January to 28 December 2025 count, up from 24 in 2024 and down from 36 in 2023. Three of the 31 were deaths from earlier years ruled homicides in 2025. That is about 4.6 per 100,000. Commissioner Michael Cox put the 2025 total 16% below the five-year average of 38.2, and 19 of the 31 victims were shot.

On the FBI's definitions, violent offenses in Fort Worth went from 5,428 in 2021 to 4,876 in 2022, 4,849 in 2023, 4,641 in 2024 and 3,859 in 2025, a 17% drop in the last year and 29% in four, and property offenses from 25,186 to 26,275, 26,098 and a peak of 27,290 in 2024, then 22,886, 16% below it. Motor vehicle theft rose from 3,687 in 2021 to 5,157 in 2024 and fell to 3,616 in 2025, down 30%. In 2025 the CDE shows aggravated assaults down 18% (3,230 to 2,656), rapes down 18% (613 to 505), robberies down 15% (726 to 620), burglaries down 16% and larcenies down 12%, while murders rose 8% (72 to 78), the one violent measure that went up. Eddie Garcia, Dallas's former police chief, took over the department in September 2025 after months without a permanent chief, and FWPD's own figures for January through August 2026 against the same months of 2025 show robberies down from 436 to 269 and aggravated assaults from 1,842 to 1,557 as well as the drop in murders (WFAA). The 2025 CDE counts were read on 30 September 2026 from a feed last refreshed on 15 September and can still be revised.

What the rates cover: Computed: 3,859 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the Fort Worth Police Department (ORI TX2201200) in calendar 2025, divided by the 1,028,117 Vintage 2025 city population. On the CDE's own agency population of 1,030,410 the rate is also 375. That is the lowest of the Texas cities this site compares, against 532 in San Antonio, 577 in Dallas and 890 in Houston. No FWPD total on this definition was found in anything fetched; the city's quarterly crime reports, as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram described them, count crimes against persons, a broader group that includes assaults and sex offenses, and put them 12% lower in the first half of 2025 than a year earlier.

Homicides: 78 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2025 in the FBI CDE, against 72 in 2024, about 7.6 per 100,000 on the city population. Spectrum News, reading city data in February 2026, also put the year's homicides 8% above 2024. Most of the rise came early: the city's quarterly reports counted 20 homicides in January through March 2025 against 9 a year earlier and 43 in the first half against 31 (Fort Worth Star-Telegram). The CDE series has fallen from 118 in 2021, and 2026 has turned the other way: FWPD counted 36 murders through 31 August against 54 in the same months of 2025 (WFAA).

BLS counted 2,747,200 nonfarm jobs in the Boston-Cambridge-Newton MSA in July 2026, up 0.3% on the 2,739,800 of July 2025, so the metro job market is flat rather than growing. Inside the city the largest industries by employment in 2024 were health care and social assistance (68,674), professional, scientific and technical services (59,267) and educational services (50,798), and the best-paid were management of companies ($120,536 median), finance and insurance ($111,396) and professional and technical services ($104,866). Hospitals and universities are not a sideline here, they are the base of the economy, which makes the city unusually exposed to federal research funding and to international student flows. bls.gov answered 403 to the fetcher, so the employment counts come through FRED and the industry mix through Data USA, both of which restate Census and BLS series.

Main sectors: Health care and social assistance (Mass General Brigham, Beth Israel Lahey, Boston Children's), Higher education and research, Professional, scientific and technical services, Finance and insurance, especially asset management and custody banking, Life sciences and biotech, in the Longwood Medical Area and along the Charles.

Property tax is the local levy that matters. Boston's certified fiscal 2026 residential rate is $12.40 per $1,000 of full and fair cash value, and an owner who is domiciled in the home gets a residential exemption of $351,108 off the assessed value, worth $4,353.74 a year at that rate; it is not automatic on purchase and has to be filed for by 1 April. Proposition 2 1/2 caps the levy a municipality may raise rather than the rate, so a rate can fall in a year when every bill rises. Massachusetts reassesses the whole residential class at full value every year, with no cap, no freeze and no reset on sale, which means the seller's current bill is a fair guide to what a buyer will pay. Nothing is charged to take title or to borrow: no buyer transfer tax and no mortgage recording tax, only the deeds excise at $4.56 per $1,000, which MGL c.64D s.1 puts on the seller. Massachusetts does levy an estate tax, unusual among the states on this site: estates over $2 million file, and since the 2023 change a credit of up to $99,600 means only the value above $2 million is taxed, at 0.8% to 16%.

BLS counted 1,222,100 nonfarm jobs in the Fort Worth-Arlington-Grapevine Metropolitan Division in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted, preliminary), up 17,800 or 1.5% on the year. Professional and business services grew fastest (+5.0%, to 159,300), then mining, logging and construction (+4.8%, to 92,100), leisure and hospitality (+4.4%, to 145,500) and transportation and warehousing (+2.1%, to 102,600), while financial activities (-2.0%), information (-1.8%) and government (-0.6%, to 136,000) shrank; federal employment fell 9.0%, from 16,700 to 15,200. Manufacturing held at 110,000, of which aerospace product and parts manufacturing was 23,600, up 1.3%. The seasonally adjusted series (SMS48231040000000001) was 1,223,400 in August 2026, 1.5% above August 2025. The Texas Comptroller credits Lockheed Martin with about 49,000 direct and indirect workers in Fort Worth and a $9 billion regional impact, and 25,579 direct employees across Texas, and counts 4,553 direct and 21,266 total jobs and $2.75 billion of state GDP for Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth in 2025. Hillwood's annual report puts AllianceTexas's economic impact at $12.9 billion in 2025 and $142.9 billion since it opened in 1989, and Hillwood says the Comptroller has recognized it as the primary inland port for the southwestern United States. American Airlines, with 103,440 staff in 2024, and BNSF Railway, with about 36,000, are both headquartered in the city (Wikipedia).

Main sectors: Aerospace and defense (Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, which builds the F-35 at Air Force Plant 4; Bell Textron, headquartered in the city; Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth, the former Carswell Air Force Base), Airlines and freight rail (American Airlines, headquartered in the city, with its largest hub at DFW Airport; BNSF Railway, headquartered in the city), Logistics and advanced manufacturing at AllianceTexas in far north Fort Worth, which Hillwood says holds 602 companies and 73,134 jobs, Trade, transportation and utilities, the division's largest sector by payroll jobs (289,300 in August 2026), Health care and education (JPS Health Network, Cook Children's Medical Center, Texas Christian University and its medical school).

Property tax is the local levy that matters. Tax Foundation puts Texas's effective property tax rate on owner-occupied homes at 1.40%, and school districts must exempt $140,000 of a homestead's value from their tax. On 15 September 2026 the City Council adopted a $3.33 billion operating budget for fiscal 2027 unanimously and raised the city's rate by 3.565 cents to 70.565 cents per $100 of taxable value on a 7 to 4 vote, to help close a $94 million shortfall. The city says the average homeowner's bill will still fall, by $8.19 to $1,643.64 on a home valued at $232,925, because the Tarrant Appraisal District has not reappraised residential property since 2024 and the average value dropped; the city's total taxable value rose only 0.89%, to $130.2 billion (Fort Worth Report, Community Impact, CBS Texas). The budget also raises stormwater, water, sewer, solid waste and environmental fees by about $7 a month for the average resident. The county, school district, JPS hospital district, Tarrant County College and other levies on the same bill belong to the housing layer.

Health care

Massachusetts has the lowest uninsured rate in the country, 2.8% in 2024 against 8.2% nationally, which is the legacy of its own 2006 coverage law and of MassHealth, the Medicaid program, expanded under the ACA. Care is still paid for through employer plans, ConnectorCare and marketplace plans, Medicare and MassHealth, and what a household pays out of pocket depends entirely on the plan. The teaching hospitals are the draw. Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's were both named to the U.S. News 2026-2027 Best Hospitals honor roll, the top 20 in the country, with Mass General first nationally in psychiatry and McLean second, Brigham and Dana-Farber third in cancer, Brigham second in obstetrics and gynecology and eighth in neuroscience, and Mass General sixth in heart and vascular care. Beth Israel Deaconess, Tufts Medical Center, Boston Children's and the rest of the Longwood Medical Area cluster fill in the rest. Density of hospitals is not the same as an appointment: this file did not verify a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

Boston Public Schools enrolled 44,416 students in 2025-26 on the state's count, down 1,678 or 3.6% from 46,094 the year before, which itself was up from 45,742 in 2023-24. Address does not settle where a child goes. Assignment runs through a choice application, and the three exam schools, Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy and the John D. O'Bryant School, admit on a composite score that is 70% grade point average and 30% the MAP Growth test, with applicants competing only inside one of four socioeconomic tiers drawn from where they live. The School Committee voted 4 to 2 in November 2025 to set aside 20% of seats for the highest scorers citywide regardless of tier, and to drop the bonus points for students at high-poverty schools; the district's own simulation put Black students' share of invitations falling from 20% to 15% and white students' rising from 27% to 33%. Higher education is the city's other anchor and a large part of its economy: Boston University counted 37,737 students in fall 2024, Northeastern is the other large private university inside the city, and Harvard and MIT are across the Charles in Cambridge.

Living there

Boston is small, old and dense in a way no other city on this site is. The median home was built in 1947, 64% of occupied homes are rented, and a quarter of workers get to work on the MBTA, against about one in a hundred in Tampa. That buys a life much of the city can live without a car, and it costs the most money of the American cities here: Zillow's typical value for June 2026 is $791,816. Winter is the part people underestimate, a 49 inch snow normal and a January mean below freezing, and the housing stock that gives the city its look is the housing stock that has to be heated. The open question is on the waterfront. The Seaport was built out over the last twenty-five years on filled land at the harbor's edge, the January 2018 tide showed what a nor'easter can do at high water, and the city now designs its coastal defenses to 2070 sea levels.

Health care

Care is paid for through employer or marketplace insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, and Texas is one of the ten states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (KFF). It had the highest uninsured rate of any state in 2024: 16.7%, or 5,152,427 of 30,799,312 people, against 8.2% nationally and 12.0% in Georgia, the next highest, on the ACS 2024 1-year estimates. The City of Fort Worth's rate was 18.9% (189,692 of 1,003,516), Tarrant County's 16.9% and the metro's 16.2%. JPS Health Network, the Tarrant County Hospital District, runs John Peter Smith Hospital, the county's public hospital, a Level I trauma center and the only psychiatric emergency site in the county; on 16 April 2026 it broke ground on a $1.5 billion replacement hospital at South Main and East Morphy streets, part of a $2.5 billion building plan backed by an $800 million bond from 2018, which will take it from 582 beds to more than 740 when it opens in 2030 (Fort Worth Report). Cook Children's Medical Center has 452 licensed beds and a Level II pediatric trauma center (Wikipedia). TCU's Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine took its first class in 2019. This file did not verify a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

Fort Worth is served by Fort Worth ISD and, in parts, by fourteen other districts, among them Keller, Northwest, Eagle Mountain-Saginaw, Crowley and Arlington (the 2020 Census school district map, as cited by Wikipedia). Fort Worth ISD is now under state control: after a campus received a fifth straight failing rating, Education Commissioner Mike Morath decided in October 2025 to intervene, and on 24 March 2026 he replaced the elected trustees' authority with a nine-member board of managers led by Pete Geren and named Peter Licata, formerly of Broward County, superintendent. It is the second-largest takeover in Texas history, after Houston ISD's. The board opened by saying roughly 63% of students do not read at grade level and 29% are proficient in math (Fort Worth Report). The district, built for 90,000 students, had 67,315 in 2025-26 on Texas Education Agency data and projected about 66,500 for 2026-27; it has lost more than 12,000 in five years and in May 2025 approved closing 18 campuses by June 2029 (CBS Texas). Texas Christian University (12,980 students in fall 2025) is about 4 miles from downtown, and the city also holds Texas Wesleyan University, UNT Health Fort Worth and Texas A&M University's law school and downtown campus.

Living there

Fort Worth has grown faster than any other US city of a million people: 11.9% since 2020, and 19,512 residents in 2024-25, a gain second only to Charlotte's; it passed a million in 2024. It is the western half of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro and works differently from Dallas: its economy leans on aircraft, airlines and freight, from the F-35 line at Lockheed Martin's plant and Bell's helicopters to the headquarters of American Airlines and BNSF and the warehouses and factories of AllianceTexas, and household income, at $82,503, is higher than in Dallas, Houston or San Antonio. It is built for the car: 74.9% of workers drive alone and 0.7% take transit, the lowest share of any city this site compares, though TEXRail runs to DFW Airport. Violent crime, at 375 per 100,000 on the FBI's counts, is the lowest of the Texas cities here. Summer is long and hot, with 24 days a year at 100F or above and 31 in a row in 2026, and hail and tornadoes are the costly weather. Texas takes no income tax, and 18.9% of residents have no health insurance. The open questions are the costs of growth: the council raised its property tax rate in September 2026 to cover a $94 million gap as appraisals stalled, the state took over the shrinking Fort Worth ISD in March 2026, and the Panther Island flood channels around downtown are not due until 2032.