If you plan on getting your master's degree in urban & regional planning, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #92 in the country in terms of popularity. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 34 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for urban & regional planning students pursuing a master's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 1,465 master's degrees in urban & regional planning to qualified students.
DEBUG: Checking offer "Urban Planning (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 1
DEBUG: ✓ Offer "Urban Planning (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" ACCEPTED (relevance 1)
DEBUG: Checking offer "Urban Planning (I Have a Bachelors)" with relevance 1
DEBUG: ✓ Offer "Urban Planning (I Have a Bachelors)" ACCEPTED (relevance 1)
DEBUG: relevant_offers count = 2
DEBUG: relevant_offers > 0, checking for ESYOH offers
DEBUG: ESYOH filtering - found 2 ESYOH offers with relevance >= 0.8
DEBUG: esyoh_offers count = 2
DEBUG: ESYOH offers found, rendering ESYOH widget
DEBUG: most_relevant_only = true, filtering for most relevant
DEBUG: Found 2 offers with relevance >= 1.0
Choosing a Great Urban & Regional Planning School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of urban & regional planning for getting your master's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality urban planning program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
The overall quality of a master's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their master's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your master's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to urban & regional planning students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other urban & regional planning students want to attend this school to pursue a master's degree.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Student Debt - How easy is it for urban & regional planning to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized urban & regional planning related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for urban & regional planning students working on their master's degree.
More Ways to Rank Urban & Regional Planning Schools
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Urban & Regional Planning Master's Degree Schools ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "architecture-and-related-services//urban-and-regional-planning"
Any student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in urban & regional planning needs to look into University of Southern California. Located in the city of Los Angeles, USC is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Master's students who receive their degree from the urban planning program make around $63,583 in the first couple years of working.
University of California - Los Angeles is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in urban & regional planning. UCLA is a fairly large public university located in the large city of Los Angeles.
Master's recipients from the urban & regional planning degree program at University of California - Los Angeles get $5,910 more than the typical college graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
It's hard to beat Columbia University in the City of New York if you wish to pursue a master's degree in urban & regional planning. Columbia is a very large private not-for-profit university located in the city of New York.
Master's recipients from the urban & regional planning program at Columbia University in the City of New York make $8,680 more than the average college graduate in this field shortly after graduation.
University of Washington - Seattle Campus is a wonderful option for students interested in a master's degree in urban & regional planning. UW Seattle is a very large public university located in the large city of Seattle.
Master's recipients from the urban & regional planning program at University of Washington - Seattle Campus earn $4,119 above the typical graduate in this field shortly after graduation.
UF is a very large public university located in the medium-sized city of Gainesville.
Master's recipients from the urban & regional planning degree program at University of Florida make $6,055 above the typical college grad in this field when they enter the workforce.
Georgia Tech is a fairly large public school located in the city of Atlanta.
Urban & Regional Planning master's degree recipients from Georgia Institute of Technology - Main Campus get an earnings boost of approximately $4,525 above the average income of urban & regional planning graduates.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).
Your choice of urban & regional planning for getting your master's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality urban planning program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
