Northwest Territories · Civic arena
Yellowknife drinking water hardness is 174 mg/L on OpenStats, plus City Score rankings and local readings.
Civic arena · hometown HUD
#77 of 343
56% City Score XP
5/8 pillars on the board
Decade trail
Yellowknife packs 5 of eight open-data pillars into its composite standing. Tap a rival below to see how the hometown stacks up head-to-head.
Rivalries on deck
Hardness, pH, and lead from municipal reports on the OpenStats water atlas. This page uses a regional estimate — open the water atlas for method notes.
Full Yellowknife water quality report →City Score rankingsCompare cities · vs The Blue Mountains · vs ArnpriorHardness guide
Watershed to tap · system map
Source, treatment, and distribution for Yellowknife from municipal and provincial water records. Open the animated map for the full watershed-to-tap diagram — no nested topic navigation here.
Permits, tax, internet, radon, hazards, drinking water, and sports rankings where a CHL hometown applies.
Yellowknife sits at City Score rank #77 with a standing of 56%, from 5 of 8 open-data pillars (tax, construction, connectivity, indoor air, water, seismic hazard, growth, safety). Missing pillars score at median standing so thin coverage cannot inflate the rank. Rising 125 places versus 2022 (#202 → #77).
Latest owned placements: indoor radon rank #223 of 327 at 86 Bq/m³ survey mean. Full tables and method notes live on each study edition; atlas readings for the same slug open from the topic buttons.
Among Canadian cities on the hub, Yellowknife carries a City Score standing of 56% (rank #77 of 343) with 5 of 8 pillars observed. Within Northwest Territories, Yellowknife ranks #1 of 1 on City Score.
The strongest signal in the current chart is seismic hazard (standing 99%, rank #338 of 343, raw score 0.015). The weakest observed pillar is broadband download (ISED seed tier) (standing 12%, rank #302 of 343).
Drinking-water hardness on the water atlas reads 174 mg/L as CaCO₃ for Yellowknife. Compare that figure to the hardness pillar on the chart and to the national hardness guide on the hub.
Arena loadout
Arena rank #77 of 343
5/8 pillars · main XP bar
Pillar avg · hardness #159
No placement
Rank #302
Rank #223
Rank #338
No placement
Yellowknife pillar standing
Eight equal-weight City Score pillars, 2025 panel year.
Source: OpenStats composite / study editions
City Score standing trend
Standing percentage by panel year (higher is better).
Years: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
Source: OpenStats composite timeseries
Achievements
Published residential mill-rate context for Yellowknife.
The heritage waterfront on Yellowknife Bay, home to Wildcat Café and the old floatplane shore. Old Town Ramble and Ride still pulls
A bush-plane landmark perched near Yellowknife Airport. Locals treat it as the hello sign for a flying town.
City aurora pages point to Northern Lighthouses around town that signal when active northern lights are in the evening forecast.
Where Yellowknife sits in published building-permit figures for July 2026.
Older hometown notes stay on the desk archive (noindex) — this section shows recent highlights only.
Yellowknife is a capital on Great Slave Lake, and the shoreline still orders the story. Old Town holds the heritage waterfront, from Wildcat Café to the old floatplane base, while Ragged Ass Road, Peace River Flats, and Back Bay keep names that sound like nowhere else in Canada. Newer civic life gathers at Somba K'e Civic Plaza and Somba K'e Park, where Sounds of Summer puts free Friday music on the lawn and Fireweed Studio keeps a seasonal craft cabin by City Hall. Across town, Kam Lake is the employment and warehouse belt the City is planning to expand. Parks here often sit on Canadian Shield granite, so a playground visit can turn into a rock scramble without leaving city limits.
Winter is not a side note. The City leans on clear nights and aurora season, mid-November through early April, and dots the streets with Northern Lighthouses that tip you when the lights are active. Summers swing the other way, with midnight sun that refuses to log off and festivals such as Folk on the Rocks in the local cultural vocabulary. Cabin Radio still sends people to Old Town Ramble and Ride when the floatplane shore wants a parade of bikes and boots. The Bristol Freighter near Yellowknife Airport stays the bush-pilot welcome marker, and Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre plus Yellowknives Dene First Nation links keep the deeper northern history in reach.
OpenStats has no City Score placement for Yellowknife in the current datapack. The hometown read is northern on purpose: lake ice and aurora alerts, Old Town floatplanes, Somba K'e concerts, and granite under the swing sets.
Drawn from City of Yellowknife, City of Yellowknife culture and heritage, City of Yellowknife weather and aurora, City of Yellowknife trails and parks, Cabin Radio.
City Score from 2016–2025 across eight open-data pillars. Individual study placements are listed in the panels below.
Each study below is its own ranking. Where a study has more than one edition for this city, the chart shows standing across those years only.
Safety · OpenStats
Statistics Canada does not publish a police-service Crime Severity Index that OpenStats can match to Yellowknife without copying a province, CMA, or another city. The safety pillar scores at median standing (50%) on City Score, the same rule used for other missing pillars.
Connectivity · OpenStats
OpenStats
Cities ranked by household-weighted maximum advertised download (Mbps) from ISED National Broadband Data hex ISP rows, with hex-to-city assignment by population-weighted gravity. The headline 2025 score is the dwelling-weighted mean of per-hex technology ceilings (fibre and cable at 1 Gbps, DSL lower). Household-weighted 50/10 availability (%) is stored on atlas rows as avail_5010_pct. Earlier panel years backcast along a national speed curve with city-specific fiber and availability paths.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Composite · OpenStats
OpenStats
Dimensional average of OpenStats open-data pillars for each panel year 2016-2025: tax, construction, connectivity, indoor air, water, seismic hazard, population growth, and crime severity. Each series is scored 0-1 within its edition; series in the same pillar are averaged, then all eight pillars are averaged with equal weight. Missing pillars score at median standing (0.5). Crime severity uses StatCan police-service CSI only (Tables 35-10-0026-01 and 35-10-0063-01); cities without a police-service match take median standing on the safety pillar. Growth uses StatCan CSD estimates; construction uses verified municipal building-permit value per resident (population field on each city record, 2021 Census vintage); mill rates and broadband use live rows plus documented year-varying estimates where needed. Radon, water, and PGA may be survey/model vintages carried forward and are flagged when static for more than two years. External commercial livability lists are never inputs.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Water · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by municipal drinking-water hardness (mg/L as CaCO₃). Hardness changes slowly; the atlas vintage is carried across panel years and flagged when static for more than two years.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Water · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by reported lead (µg/L) on the OpenStats water atlas. Carried across panel years until annual municipal report panels are ingested.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Health · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by Health Canada survey mean indoor radon (Bq/m³). Rank 1 is the highest mean. Decade panel years without a new survey carry the CMA survey vintage forward; they are not annual retests.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Growth · OpenStats
OpenStats
Cities ranked by year-over-year population growth from Statistics Canada annual CSD estimates (Table 17-10-0155-01). Rank 1 is fastest growth. A few places without a clean CSD match use a provincial-path estimate anchored to seed population.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Hazards · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by NRCan peak ground acceleration (higher = stronger shaking hazard). Rank 1 is highest PGA. The seismic model is multi-year; values are carried across the City Score panel and flagged as static until NRCan publishes a new generation.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Distinctive local notes and places, each linked to its source.
City aurora pages point to Northern Lighthouses around town that signal when active northern lights are in the evening forecast.
Somba K'e Civic Plaza hosts the Sounds of Summer free Friday concert series through late August.
Many playgrounds and parks are built into Canadian Shield granite, so rock climbing sits beside the swing sets.
The Bristol Freighter near Yellowknife Airport is listed as the city's Welcome Monument for bush pilots.
The heritage waterfront on Yellowknife Bay, home to Wildcat Café and the old floatplane shore. Old Town Ramble and Ride still pulls the neighbourhood into the annual calendar.
Civic lawn near City Hall for summer concerts and Fireweed Studio season. Bring a chair on Fridays when Sounds of Summer is on.
A bush-plane landmark perched near Yellowknife Airport. Locals treat it as the hello sign for a flying town.
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