Living in Rome, GA

Floyd County

Rome is the real "City of Seven Hills" -- a name grounded in actual, documented geography rather than marketing. The Etowah and Oostanaula Rivers physically converge within the city to form the Coosa River, and the city itself developed across seven named hills (Blossom, Jackson, Lumpkin, Mount Aventine, Myrtle, Old Shorter, and Neely), which inspired its founders in 1834 to name it for Rome, Italy. The site was previously Head of Coosa, a major Cherokee settlement, and national Cherokee leaders including Major Ridge and John Ross lived in the area before Indian Removal. Rome's higher-education profile is genuinely distinctive for a city of its size: Berry College's 27,000-acre campus is verified as the world's largest contiguous college campus by area (though its undergraduate enrollment is a modest 2,254, fall 2024), and Shorter University, a smaller private Baptist university, is also physically located in the city (enrollment cited in a disclosed 983-1,410 range across sources). Healthcare access is genuinely strong for a city this size, with two independent hospital systems -- the 304-bed Atrium Health Floyd Medical Center and the 230-bed AdventHealth Redmond -- both physically in Rome and together serving northwest Georgia and northeast Alabama. Rome runs genuinely affordable: BestPlaces' cost-of-living index sits at 81.1 (about 19% below the national average), though housing carries real, disclosed disagreement -- Redfin's city-level figure shows a striking $275,000 median sale price, up 44.1% year over year, while the broader Floyd County figure shows a much more modest $255,000, up just 2.0% -- a real, unresolved discrepancy that may reflect a genuine shift toward higher-value city sales (including a hot Downtown Rome submarket, up 44.3% YoY) rather than a uniform citywide increase. Property taxes are similarly layered: the City of Rome's 2025 combined millage rate (city government plus the separately-operated Rome City Schools system) is 26.25 mills, on top of a separate Floyd County government rate of 9.5 mills -- whether additional county fire/solid-waste district millage also applies within city limits was not confirmed this session, a genuine, disclosed data gap. Ownwell separately cites Rome's median effective property tax rate at 1.14%, above both the national and Georgia state medians. As a real, inland northwest Georgia market -- immediately adjacent to Dalton's Whitfield County in this same build batch -- Rome's defining hazard is severe thunderstorm and tornado risk, not hurricane. The historic April 27, 2011 Super Outbreak produced a direct, documented EF2 tornado with 125 mph winds and knocked out power to more than 17,000 Floyd County customers, part of a broader, deadly statewide event.

Explore Rome in depth

• Cost of Living & Housing in Rome
• Moving to Rome: Pros, Cons & What to Know

Housing

Taxes

The tradeoffs

Who this fits

Best for: Affordability-focused buyers and first-time homebuyers drawn to a genuinely low cost of living, real historic and geographic character, and an unusual concentration of higher-education and healthcare access for a city this size.

Maybe not for you if: Buyers highly averse to tornado/severe-thunderstorm risk, or who need a fully reconciled, simple property-tax picture before committing, should weigh Rome's real, documented 2011 tornado history and its genuinely layered city-plus-county tax structure carefully -- confirm a specific property's combined tax bill directly rather than estimating from the millage figures alone. Anyone needing coastal beach access or a large-city job market should look elsewhere in this dataset.