Bellevue, WA

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• Top 6 Suburbs of Seattle

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• Redmond, WA

  Redmond has been home to Microsoft's global headquarters since the company relocated there from Bellevue in 1986, and the sprawling campus — which has grown to include dozens of buildings across hundreds of acres — has made Redmond one of the most economically significant small cities in the entire Pacific Northwest relative to its modest population of roughly 75,000 residents. Nintendo of America's headquarters is also based in Redmond, giving the city an unusual concentration of two globally significant technology and gaming companies within a few miles of each other, a density of major corporate employment rare for a suburb of Redmond's size anywhere in the country. Despite that heavy corporate presence, Redmond has maintained a genuine outdoor-recreation identity as well — the city bills itself as the "Bicycle Capital of the Northwest," with an extensive network of mountain biking and road cycling trails, including the Marymoor Park velodrome, one of the only outdoor cycling tracks of its kind on the West Coast. Redmond's combination of hosting Microsoft's entire global headquarters, a significant Nintendo of America presence, and a genuinely well-developed cycling and outdoor-recreation culture has made it one of the most economically important and recreationally distinctive suburbs anywhere in the greater Seattle area.

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• Kirkland, WA

  Kirkland sits on the eastern shore of Lake Washington, and its waterfront downtown, built directly along the lake with public parks and beaches within walking distance of Main Street shops and restaurants, has given it one of the more genuinely walkable and scenic downtown cores of any suburb on Seattle's Eastside. Google has built a substantial engineering campus in Kirkland over the past decade, adding to the broader concentration of major technology company offices across the Eastside suburbs and giving Kirkland its own significant corporate tech presence alongside its historic identity as a lakefront residential and boating community. The city's downtown marina and public docks have made recreational boating a genuine part of local life, and a summer concert series held at one of the downtown waterfront parks draws residents from across the Eastside to Kirkland specifically for its lake access, a feature that distinguishes it from more inland Eastside suburbs like Redmond and Sammamish. Kirkland's combination of a genuinely walkable, lake-facing downtown, a significant and growing Google engineering presence, and an established recreational boating culture has made it one of the more scenic and consistently desirable suburbs anywhere along Lake Washington's eastern shore.

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• Mercer Island, WA

  Mercer Island sits in the middle of Lake Washington itself, connected to both Seattle and Bellevue by the I-90 floating bridge, which crosses the island's northern end — a genuinely unusual geography that puts island residents within a roughly ten-minute drive of both downtowns while still maintaining a distinctly separate, lower-density residential identity. The island's roughly 25,000 residents have long favored strict zoning and building-height limits, a deliberate policy choice that's kept Mercer Island almost entirely residential and low-rise even as both Seattle and Bellevue have grown substantially taller and denser on either side of it over the past two decades. Mercer Island's public schools have consistently ranked among the strongest in Washington State, a reputation that, combined with the island's central location and controlled-growth housing stock, has made it one of the most consistently expensive residential markets in the entire greater Seattle area on a per-square-foot basis. Luther Burbank Park, a former boys' reformatory converted into public parkland along the island's northeastern shore, gives residents direct Lake Washington access and walking trails within a short distance of most of the island's neighborhoods, reinforcing Mercer Island's identity as a genuinely quiet, low-density residential enclave sitting directly between two much larger and faster-growing downtowns.

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• Issaquah, WA

  Issaquah sits at the base of the Cascade foothills east of Bellevue, and its position at the edge of significant hiking terrain — including the popular Tiger Mountain and Squak Mountain trail networks — has given it a genuinely outdoorsy identity distinct from the more purely corporate character of some of its Eastside neighbors. Costco Wholesale has been headquartered in Issaquah since 1996, and the warehouse retail giant's global headquarters campus has made the city one of the more economically significant suburbs on the Eastside despite its comparatively modest population of around 40,000 residents. The city's historic downtown, built originally around coal mining and railroad industries in the late 19th century, has been preserved alongside newer development, giving Issaquah a genuine small-town commercial core distinct from the master-planned retail centers found in some of the area's more recently developed suburbs. Issaquah's combination of direct access to Cascade foothill hiking trails, a major global corporate headquarters in Costco, and a preserved historic downtown core has made it one of the more distinctively outdoors-oriented suburbs anywhere on Seattle's rapidly growing Eastside.

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• Sammamish, WA

  Sammamish incorporated as its own independent city only in 1999, making it one of the more recently established municipalities among Seattle's Eastside suburbs, and its rapid growth since then — from roughly 34,000 residents at incorporation to well over 65,000 by the mid-2020s — has been driven substantially by the broader tech-sector expansion across the Eastside. The city sits between Lake Sammamish and the Issaquah Alps foothills, and its residential development has leaned heavily toward larger single-family homes on suburban lots rather than the denser, more urban-style development taking shape in neighboring Bellevue and Redmond's downtown cores. Sammamish's public schools, split between the Lake Washington and Issaquah school districts, have consistently ranked among the highest performing in Washington State, a reputation that's made the city a particularly strong draw for tech-industry families specifically prioritizing school quality alongside proximity to major Eastside employers. Sammamish's combination of relatively recent incorporation, rapid tech-driven population growth, and consistently top-ranked schools split across two well-regarded districts has made it one of the fastest-growing and most family-oriented suburbs anywhere on Seattle's Eastside.

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More in Where to Live

• Portland, OR

  Portland's unofficial civic slogan, "Keep Portland Weird," reflects a genuine and long-cultivated civic identity built around independent business, eccentric public art, and a resistance to homogenized national chain culture — one the city has largely succeeded in preserving even as it's grown substantially over the past three decades. The city was among the first in the country to adopt a formal urban growth boundary, established in 1979 under Oregon's statewide land-use planning law, deliberately limiting suburban sprawl and concentrating development within a defined area — a policy choice credited with helping preserve the region's surrounding farmland and forest while also being blamed, by some critics, for contributing to rising in-city housing costs over subsequent decades. Portland has built one of the most bike-friendly infrastructure networks of any major American city, with an extensive network of dedicated bike lanes and one of the highest rates of bicycle commuting in the country, complementing a food-cart culture so extensive that entire city blocks are sometimes organized as semi-permanent food-cart "pods" rather than traditional storefronts. Powell's City of Books, occupying an entire city block downtown, is one of the largest independent bookstores in the world by inventory, and its continued success alongside a broader culture of independent coffee shops, breweries, and record stores has made Portland one of the most frequently cited examples nationally of a mid-sized American city building an identity deliberately around independent, small-scale local business rather than national chains.

• Raleigh, NC

  Raleigh, named directly for English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, was founded in 1792 specifically to serve as North Carolina's state capital, and it forms one corner of the Research Triangle alongside Durham and Chapel Hill — a name coined in the 1950s around the deliberate creation of Research Triangle Park, a large research and technology campus built specifically to anchor the region's universities to private-sector employers. That triangle of institutions — North Carolina State University in Raleigh itself, Duke University in Durham, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — has fed a sustained, decades-long pipeline of research talent into the technology, biotech, and pharmaceutical firms clustered in and around Research Triangle Park, giving the metro area an economic base built substantially around higher education and applied research. That foundation has translated into consistently strong job growth over the past two decades, with Raleigh regularly appearing near the top of national rankings for tech-sector and biotech employment growth, and rankings, drawing a steady wave of relocating professionals from higher cost-of-living metro areas along both coasts. Raleigh's combination of a genuine research-university economic base, comparatively lower cost of living than many coastal tech hubs, and a growing downtown restaurant and arts scene has made it one of the more consistently recommended mid-sized American cities for movers specifically seeking Sun Belt job growth without the highest-tier housing costs of Austin or Denver.

• Minneapolis, MN

  Minneapolis is known as the "City of Lakes," with thirteen lakes located within the city limits itself, and the Chain of Lakes park system connecting several of the largest of them via a continuous public trail has made lake access — for swimming, running, biking, and paddling — a defining part of daily life for residents in a way few other major American cities can match. The city built one of the most extensive enclosed pedestrian skyway systems in the world beginning in the 1960s, connecting dozens of downtown buildings via climate-controlled second-story walkways specifically to make the notoriously cold Minnesota winters more livable for downtown workers and residents — a practical piece of urban infrastructure that's become one of the city's most distinctive physical features. Minneapolis's arts and music scene has produced an outsized cultural footprint relative to the city's size — the Guthrie Theater is one of the most respected regional theater companies in the country, and First Avenue, the downtown nightclub where Prince recorded much of the concert footage for Purple Rain, remains an active and celebrated music venue decades after the film's 1984 release. Functioning as one half of the Twin Cities alongside neighboring Saint Paul across the Mississippi River, Minneapolis's combination of extensive lake access, genuinely functional cold-weather urban design, and a music and theater scene with real national reach has made it a consistent presence on "best cities to live" rankings despite a climate that's, by most measures, among the coldest of any major US metro area.

• Charleston, SC

  Charleston occupies a peninsula between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers on South Carolina's coast, and its historic district — one of the largest and best-preserved collections of pre-Civil War architecture in the country, including the iconic pastel row houses of Rainbow Row — has made it one of the most photographed and visited historic city centers in the United States. The city has topped Travel + Leisure and Condé Nast Traveler readers' polls for "best city in the United States" more times than almost any other American city over the past two decades, a sustained run of recognition built substantially on that historic architecture, a nationally regarded restaurant and culinary scene, and a walkable, cobblestone-street downtown scaled for pedestrians rather than cars. Charleston's history is genuinely complex and increasingly reckoned with directly rather than glossed over — the city was a major point of entry for the transatlantic slave trade, and the International African American Museum, which opened on the Charleston waterfront in 2023 at the site of a former slave-trading wharf, has become a significant addition to how the city presents its own history to visitors. The College of Charleston, founded in 1770, is among the oldest institutions of higher education in the country, and the city's combination of deep colonial and antebellum history, an increasingly candid public reckoning with that history's darker chapters, and a consistently top-ranked culinary and hospitality scene has kept Charleston one of the most nationally celebrated mid-sized cities in the United States.

• Denver, CO

  Denver's nickname, "the Mile High City," is precise rather than approximate — the fifteenth step of the Colorado State Capitol building is marked at exactly 5,280 feet above sea level, a detail the city has embraced as a literal point of civic identity rather than just a loose figure of speech. The city functions as the primary gateway to the Rocky Mountains for both residents and visitors, and that proximity to world-class skiing, hiking, and outdoor recreation within roughly an hour or two's drive has become one of Denver's single biggest draws for the wave of remote workers and outdoor-recreation-focused movers who relocated there in significant numbers through the 2010s and early 2020s. Denver's economy has diversified substantially beyond its historical roots in mining and energy, building genuine strength in aerospace, technology, and craft brewing — the metro area has one of the highest concentrations of breweries per capita of any major American city, anchored by the annual Great American Beer Festival, one of the largest beer competitions and festivals in the country. That rapid growth and diversification have made Denver one of the most consistently cited "best cities to live" picks in national rankings over the past decade, even as the city, like Austin, has faced real housing-affordability pressure and rising cost of living as a direct consequence of that same sustained population growth.