Living in Aurora, CO

Arapahoe, Adams & Douglas Counties (a home-rule city spanning three counties)

Aurora's identity runs through two real, verified anchors that set it apart from being just "the big suburb east of Denver": genuine, institutionally-backed diversity, and a real regional healthcare and military footprint. On diversity, Aurora is Colorado's 3rd-largest city outright (394,432 per the Census Bureau's estimate through July 2024) and its most diverse -- 21.9% of residents were born outside the country as of 2024 (roughly 86,500 people), 160 languages are spoken across its public schools, and the city runs its own dedicated International and Immigrant Affairs office, a genuine institutional commitment rather than a marketing line. The city's foreign-born population traces to a genuinely broad, multi-continental mix of origin countries -- Mexico, Ethiopia, South Korea, El Salvador, Vietnam, Honduras, India, the Philippines, China, and Nepal each represent real, named shares. On institutions, the Anschutz Medical Campus anchors a genuine regional healthcare economy: UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital (653 beds) and the nationally ranked Children's Hospital Colorado together handle more than 2.9 million patient visits a year, and UCHealth itself was named Colorado's #1 employer by Forbes in 2021, now running more than 30,000 employees across 12 Colorado locations. Buckley Space Force Base sits inside city limits, home to more than 13,000 personnel and a real, multi-billion-dollar economic footprint, though its exact year-over-year trend carries a genuine, disclosed tension across sources this pass rather than one settled trajectory. Housing runs meaningfully more affordable than Denver's own median in this dataset -- a plausible $462,000-$485,000 range this pass, well below Denver's $612K-$640K -- though one Redfin-adjacent citation ($755,000, +64% YoY) looks like a real data anomaly, disclosed rather than treated as fact. Crime data shows a real, disclosed split by source and measure (NeighborhoodScout's high overall rate versus CrimeGrade's narrower violent-crime figure), alongside a genuine, current positive trend: citywide crime fell 22.8% in 2025 per Aurora's police chief. Schools split meaningfully by zone -- Cherry Creek School District (serving southeast Aurora, ranked #6 in Colorado by Niche) reads considerably stronger than Aurora Joint School District No. 28 (B- overall), a real distinction worth confirming for any specific address. Like the rest of the Front Range, Aurora shares Denver's real "Hail Alley" hazard profile, with its open-plains eastern geography cited as making it especially hail-vulnerable -- not a hurricane or extreme-desert-heat risk profile.

Explore Aurora in depth

• Moving to Aurora: Pros, Cons & What to Know
• Cost of Living in Aurora
• Housing Market in Aurora
• Buying a Home in Aurora
• Renting in Aurora
• Taxes in Aurora
• Homeowners Insurance & Natural Hazard Costs in Aurora
• Climate & Weather in Aurora
• Jobs & Economy in Aurora
• Schools in Aurora
• Crime & Safety in Aurora
• Healthcare in Aurora
• Traffic & Transportation in Aurora
• Best Areas to Live in Aurora
• Pros and Cons of Living in Aurora
• Retiring in Aurora
• Who Should / Shouldn’t Move to Aurora

Housing

Taxes

The tradeoffs

Who this fits

Best for: Families and first-time buyers wanting genuinely more affordable housing than Denver, a real institutional diversity/immigrant-community identity, and direct access to a major regional healthcare employer (Anschutz/UCHealth); military families connected to Buckley Space Force Base.

Maybe not for you if: Buyers who weight crime-data safety scores heavily should review both NeighborhoodScout's and CrimeGrade's genuinely different framings for a specific address, and confirm which school district (Cherry Creek vs. Aurora JD-28) zones a given property before assuming one citywide school quality applies.