9 Best Places To Call Home In Iowa In 2026

Affordable housing, steady employment, and access to recreation make several Iowa towns appealing places to settle down. Marshalltown offers major employers and an extensive park system; Mason City pairs low-cost housing with Prairie School architecture and musical history; and Clinton boasts Mississippi River recreation alongside manufacturing jobs. Farther south, Fort Madison provides riverfront living and a diverse industrial base, while smaller communities such as Boone and Oelwein offer railroad heritage, outdoor spaces, and home prices below the state average. Based on housing costs, population size, job opportunities, and local amenities, these nine Iowa towns stand out as practical places to call home.

Marshalltown

Two manufacturers anchor a town of about 27,900 people, which is an unusual ratio in central Iowa. The JBS pork plant is the largest private employer in Marshalltown, and Emerson's Fisher operation builds industrial control valves on the north side of the city. Between them, the wage base does not depend on anyone driving to Des Moines, though the capital is about an hour away if a household needs a second income there. Typical home values run near $180,000, and the cost of living sits both below the state and national averages. Marshall County also offers residents 22 city-managed parks and the Grimes Farm and Conservation Center, where a 30-foot observation tower overlooks restored prairie and timber.

Mason City

The Historic Park Inn, which opened downtown in 1910, is the only surviving hotel of the six Frank Lloyd Wright designed. It reopened in 2011 after a restoration and still takes guests in 27 rooms. A few blocks away, the Rock Crest-Rock Glen district holds the largest collection of Prairie School houses built around a single natural setting, most of them designed by Wright associates, including Walter Burley Griffin. Meredith Willson, who wrote The Music Man, grew up here, and his boyhood home stands beside a museum devoted to the show. Mason City holds about 27,300 residents, sits roughly halfway between Des Moines and Minneapolis, and carries a typical home value of $162,000, with healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and education supplying most of the payroll. Outside town, the Lime Creek Nature Center covers several hundred acres of trail and river bottom.

Clinton

Three enormous wooden trolls named Helmut, Marvin, and Warren went up in Clinton on May 1, 2026, built by volunteers from designs by Danish artist Thomas Dambo. One stands at the Sawmill Museum, one at Bickelhaupt Arboretum, and one inside a former railroad depot at Riverview Park, with a fourth installation hidden in Eagle Point Park for anyone who solves the clues. The choice of material was deliberate. Clinton called itself the Lumber Capital of the World in the late 1800s, and the trolls are built largely from reclaimed local timber. The museum expects the sculptures to bring tens of thousands of visitors a year to a city of about 24,500 with a typical home value near $136,000. Corn processing, food manufacturing, healthcare, and logistics carry the job base, with Archer Daniels Midland, Custom-Pak, and Nestle Purina PetCare among the larger names.

Burlington

Snake Alley climbs 275 feet up a Burlington hillside through five half-curves and two quarter-curves at a 21 percent grade, and Ripley's Believe It or Not once called it the crookedest street in the world. Local masons laid the bricks edge-up in 1894 so horses could find footing on the climb, and the street entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. Every Memorial Day weekend, cyclists race up it. About 24,000 people live here, the typical home value runs near $129,000, and downtown Burlington keeps a working retail and restaurant core rather than a preserved one. Winegard, which makes antennas, and Frank Millard and Company are both headquartered in town. Amtrak's California Zephyr stops at the depot, which matters for anyone who travels to Chicago or Denver more than occasionally.

Fort Dodge

Four abandoned grain silos on the Des Moines River carry the largest mural in Iowa, 110 feet tall and wrapped a full 360 degrees. Australian artist Guido van Helten painted it over nine weeks in late 2018, using seven Fort Dodge residents as models, each of them holding a piece of locally made stoneware in a nod to the city's pottery industry. The town leans into that streak with the slogan "Dodge the Ordinary." A city of roughly 24,900 keeps a typical home value near $133,000 and short commutes to the hospitals, community college, and freight operations that supply most of the work, including Decker Truck Line, which started here in 1931. The Blanden Memorial Art Museum opened in 1932 as the first permanent municipal art museum in Iowa, and the Fort Museum and Frontier Village display a replica of the Cardiff Giant, the 1869 hoax carved from gypsum quarried near Fort Dodge. Soldier Creek Winery and the Community Orchard sit on the edge of town.

Newton

Maytag built washing machines in Newton for more than a century, and then it stopped. Whirlpool bought the company in 2006 and shut the Newton plant and headquarters in October 2007, costing roughly 1,800 jobs in a town of about 15,000. What happened afterward is the reason Newton belongs on this list. The city recruited wind-energy manufacturing to the vacated industrial space, landed Iowa Speedway, and held its population steady at about 15,800 throughout it all. The speedway, a 7/8-mile oval that NASCAR bought in 2014, is the only short track the sanctioning body owns west of the Mississippi. Maytag Dairy Farms is still independent and still makes the blue cheese it developed with Iowa State University in 1941. Typical home values run near $209,000, the highest here after Boone, which reflects the 35-minute drive to Des Moines on Interstate 80. The Valle Drive-In, open since 1948, is the oldest of the four drive-in theaters still operating in the state.

Fort Madison

A full-scale reconstruction of the 1808 garrison that gave the town its name sits on the Mississippi riverfront, staffed in season by interpreters in period dress. Fort Madison is the smallest of the larger towns here, with about 10,300 people, and it has the second-cheapest housing, with typical values near $116,000. The Lee County industrial base runs to chemicals, food processing, and wind-turbine components, and it has been cyclical enough over the past decade that anyone relocating for a specific plant should check current hiring directly. The river supplies most of the recreation, from boat ramps and fishing to the walking paths along the levee. Burlington is 20 minutes north, which widens the job search without requiring a move.

Boone

The Kate Shelley High Bridge crosses the Des Moines River valley three miles west of town, 185 feet above the water and 2,685 feet end to end, which makes it one of the highest and longest double-track railroad bridges in the country. Railroading is the local through line. Boone was platted as Montana in 1865, took its current name in 1871 after Captain Nathan Boone, and grew around the tracks that arrived in 1866 to move coal out of the river valley. The Boone and Scenic Valley Railroad now runs heritage excursions over that same country. Mamie Doud Eisenhower was born here, and her restored birthplace opens for tours from June through October. Ledges State Park, four miles south, has drawn hikers into its sandstone canyons since 1924. Boone carries the highest typical home value on this list at about $217,000, still under the statewide figure, in a town of roughly 12,500 that sits 15 minutes from Ames and Iowa State University.

Oelwein

Oelwein earned the name Hub City because the Chicago Great Western built its main shops and yards here, and the Hub City Railway Museum has documented that history since 1987, along with the Rock Island, the Chicago and North Western, and the lines that followed. About 5,900 people live in this Fayette County town in northeast Iowa, and the typical home value of roughly $115,000 is the lowest of the nine. Food processing, healthcare, and utilities supply most of the local jobs, with Waterloo and Cedar Falls about 40 minutes southwest for anything the town itself does not offer. Amish settlements around Hazleton and Fairbank sell furniture, baked goods, and produce within a short drive. Anglers work the Wapsipinicon River and the smaller creeks that feed it.

Weighing the Nine

The cheapest housing sits farthest from a metro. Oelwein, Fort Madison, and Burlington all carry typical values under $130,000, and all three are an hour or more from Des Moines or Cedar Rapids, which is the trade every buyer on this list is really making. Boone and Newton cost the most and buy the shortest drives, 15 minutes to Ames in one case and 35 to Des Moines in the other. In the middle sit the towns with employment bases large enough to stand on their own: Marshalltown with two major manufacturers, Mason City with a regional hospital and a tourism draw built on architecture, Clinton with river industry and, as of this spring, a public art project that expects six figures of annual visitors. These nine little Iowa towns are worth considering.