Living in Springfield, IL

Crime rates in Springfield are a touch above the national midpoint. The violent crime index comes in at 112 and property crime at 93, where 100 represents the U.S. average. That's not alarming, but it's enough that you should spend real time researching specific neighborhoods rather than assuming everywhere is equally fine. Talk to people who live there, walk the streets at different hours, and check the local police department's crime map. FBI UCR data.

Rent in Springfield is genuinely cheap relative to what people earn here. Median rent is $945/month and median household income is $65,537/year — that's a 17.3% rent-to-income ratio, which is rare in today's housing market. Lower demand, cheaper land, or strong local wages could all be factors. Whatever the cause, your dollar stretches further here than in most places. Census ACS 2023.

Most people in Springfield are at work within 16 minutes — a pretty reasonable commute by American standards. The breakdown: 76.3% drive alone, 1.7% take public transit, and 12.1% work from home. Rush hour adds time, obviously, but the baseline is manageable.

Everything on this page is built from public government sources: rent and income figures from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS 5-Year Estimates, 2023); commute and transportation data from Census ACS tables B08303 and B08006; crime rates from the FBI Uniform Crime Report. We refresh each dataset monthly through an automated pipeline and cross-check for anomalies. No surveys, no user-submitted guesses — just official federal data presented in a way that's actually useful for people researching a move.