Castle Rock just picked up a bragging-rights headline: WalletHub's 2026 Best Small Cities in America ranking, published Sept. 29, 2026, puts the town 15th out of 1,318 small cities nationwide, the highest ranking of any city in Colorado.
The number
Castle Rock's total score is 68.93 out of 100, landing it between Brentwood, Tennessee (68.96) and Lancaster, Pennsylvania (68.69) on WalletHub's full ranked list. The ranking covers U.S. cities with populations between 25,000 and 100,000.
No other Colorado city comes close. The next-highest Colorado city on the list, Broomfield, scored 65.85, which is well outside the top 50.
How Castle Rock scored, category by category
WalletHub builds its total score from five weighted categories. Castle Rock's rank in each, out of all 1,318 cities:
| Category | Castle Rock's rank |
|---|---|
| Affordability | 80th |
| Economic Health | 65th |
| Education & Health | 64th |
| Safety | 32nd |
| Quality of Life | 449th |
Safety is Castle Rock's strongest showing. Quality of Life is, by a wide margin, its weakest, and it's the one honest gap in an otherwise strong overall rank.
Why it's worth knowing
It's the kind of number that's easy to drop at a chamber mixer: a top-15 finish nationally, and the best score of any town in the state, from a source that isn't the Town patting itself on the back. The soft spot in Quality of Life is worth knowing too, if only because it's the one category where Castle Rock's rank badly lags the other four.
Some of what's behind the stronger categories is visible around town right now: the county-backed Gold Crown youth field house breaking ground in Dawson Trails, and Lost Canyon Ranch Open Space, which opened all 15 miles of planned trail this year. And for the kind of local color that doesn't show up in any WalletHub category: this is also the town where a bear got dumped into a trash truck and climbed right back out.
Source: WalletHub, "Best Small Cities to Live In," 2026 ranking (published Sept. 29, 2026). Rank and category scores pulled directly from the page's own ranked data table, sorted by Total Score. Checked Oct. 5, 2026.