In the latest of a string of kudos, Durham made the Career Cast.com list of the top 10 best places to live and work.

It lists them as: Austin, TX; Columbus, OH; Durham, NC; Ft. Worth, TX; Houston, TX; Lincoln, NE; Midland, TX; Pittsburgh, PA; Tucson, AZ; and Wausau, WI. The full survey is here: http://www.careercast.com/jobs-rated/10-best-cities-return-salary

Whether you’re a recent college grad, or someone looking for high paying careers in metropolitan areas with a low cost of living, CareerCast says its Best Places to Live and Work report is a guide to some of the best places to consider.

“The income a candidate can command is contingent on availability of jobs in a specific region,” says Kyle Kensing, Online Content Editor, CareerCast. “For example, the San Francisco Bay Area – which ranks behind only New York City for average cost of living – might be your best value if you work in computer science.”

Low cost of living

Durham, it points out, has the third lowest cost of living among the ten (following Lincoln, NE and Columbus, OH. It’s median household income, at $51,968, however, is lower than all but Tucson, AZ among the ten cities. Its unemployment at 4.2 percent is a tad higher than all but four of the other cities. It has its own advantages, though.

Cities with major universities are also great places to live and work, for instance, CareerCast notes:  Lincoln, Nebraska (University of Nebraska-Lincoln); Tucson, Arizona (University of Arizona); Columbus, Ohio (The Ohio State University); and Durham, North Carolina (Duke University and North Carolina Central University) all appear in the Top 10, as well as Austin, home to the University of Texas. All have below-average cost-of-living expenses, and each ranks in highly-paid Jobs Rated careers.

Methodology: CareerCast cross-referenced the salaries of the 200 careers tracked by the Jobs Rated report, broken down by metropolitan area via the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. CareerCast then measured average cost of living in cities that paid comparatively well in a broad range of sectors, using Payscale.com’s Cost of Living Calculator, with data via the Council for Community and Economic Research.

CareerCast.com is a job search portal that offers extensive local, niche and national job listings from across North America; job-hunting, career-management and HR-focused editorial content; and videos and blogs; and provides recruiters with the ability to post jobs directly to more than 800 niche career sites.

http://www.careercast.com/jobs-rated/10-best-cities-return-salary