Urban & Regional Planning is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #92 most popular master's degree program in the country. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 8 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Urban & Regional Planning Master's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 320 master's degrees in urban & regional planning during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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 include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a host of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 complete 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
The urban planning school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Urban & Regional Planning Master's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region.
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University of Virginia - Main Campus is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in urban & regional planning. University of Virginia is a fairly large public university located in the suburb of Charlottesville.
Soon after graduating, urban planning master's recipients typically earn around $58,018 at the beginning of their careers.
It is difficult to beat University of Florida if you wish to pursue a master's degree in urban & regional planning. UF is a fairly large public university located in the city of Gainesville.
Those urban & regional planning students who get their master's degree from University of Florida earn $6,977 more than the typical urban planning graduate.
Georgia Institute of Technology - Main Campus is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a master's degree in urban & regional planning. Georgia Tech is a very large public school located in the city of Atlanta.
Those urban & regional planning students who get their master's degree from Georgia Institute of Technology - Main Campus make $5,447 more than the typical urban planning student.
Every student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in urban & regional planning needs to look into Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech is a very large public school located in the small city of Blacksburg.
Soon after graduating, urban planning master's recipients usually earn around $61,042 in the first five years of their career.
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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
