Moving to Clearfield, Utah.

Clearfield was a quiet farm settlement called Sand Ridge, settled in 1877 by Richard and Emily Hamblin, until two federal decisions remade it. Construction of Hill Field, now Hill Air Force Base, began in 1940 on its eastern boundary, and in 1943 the U.S. Navy built the Clearfield Naval Supply Depot on its west side, a massive inland supply base for the Pacific Fleet. The depot was phased out by 1962 and reborn as the Freeport Center, today one of the West's largest manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution complexes. The town that grew up between those two installations incorporated as a city in 1946, marked its centennial as a municipality in 2022 with a rebrand and a new logo, and in 2024 rolled out a military-themed public art initiative to go with it. This is a city that knows exactly what built it.

The geography is simple and useful: 7.75 square miles of flat Lake Bonneville lakebed at the center of Davis County, with the Wasatch Range filling the eastern sky and the Great Salt Lake shorelands running out to the west. I-15 and State Street run through it, SR-193 connects it to Hill AFB's West Gate, FrontRunner stops downtown, and since January 2024 the West Davis Highway has given the west side a second freeway. Per the 2020 census it held 31,909 people, and the Census Bureau's 2024 estimate puts it near 34,778, roughly nine percent growth in four years.

For a buyer, the practical version is this: Clearfield is one of Davis County's more attainable established markets, a mostly built-out grid of post-war and mid-century homes with a wave of new attached construction clustering around the train station and the ponds. The city is actively building the downtown it never historically had, at Clearfield Station and Lakeside Square, and the trade-offs are honest ones, older housing stock, jet noise on some streets, and truck-and-rail rhythm near the Freeport Center. The rest of this guide walks through all of it, including the parts a brochure would skip.

Clearfield gets the classic Wasatch Front valley-floor climate: four distinct seasons, semi-arid, with dry low-humidity summers and most of the year's moisture arriving as winter snow and spring rain. Per the closest labeled station compilation, Ogden-Hill AFB, July averages run about 91°F by day and 64°F at night, January about 37°F and 21°F, with roughly 22 inches of annual precipitation and snowfall around 41 inches per the nearby Ogden station. Because the city sits a few miles east of the Great Salt Lake, lake-effect bands can locally enhance snowfall along this stretch of Davis County, especially in early winter. And because the terrain is flat lakebed from one city limit to the other, there is no real microclimate variation within town, unlike the east-bench cities up against the mountains.

Housing is the headline, and the numbers are worth stating per source rather than blended.

The rest of the cost picture is ordinary Davis County. Combined sales tax runs 7.25 percent. The ACS 2024 five-year median household income is $75,495. And one quiet structural advantage: the city built a citywide open-access UTOPIA fiber network, so residents choose among competing internet providers on the same line, which keeps that bill honest.

Clearfield's housing stock tells its history. The 1940s-to-1960s boom that followed Hill Field and the Navy depot built much of the city, modest brick ramblers and cottages on flat, rectangular lots along the State Street grid. The 1960s through the 1980s filled the east and west quadrants with ramblers and split-entry homes, the bread and butter of today's resale inventory. The newest wave is heavily attached product clustered near transit and the arterials: Clearfield Station's planned units, Lakeside Square's first 296, and townhome projects along Antelope Drive. New detached single-family construction inside city limits is comparatively scarce, because at 7.75 square miles the city is nearly built out.

One market mechanic worth understanding: Hill AFB's roughly 27,000 jobs next door and the base's assignment cycles sustain steady rental demand and turnover here, and a meaningful share of the city's stock is investor-held rental product. For a buyer, the corollary is that the same demand supports resale and rent-out optionality down the road. That is a statement about the jobs and the market, and it is all the page will say about it.

Clearfield is building more right now than it has in decades, just not the way a greenfield suburb builds. The city is nearly built out for detached homes, so the action is attached and mixed-use, and it is concentrated in a few named projects on the city's own development docket. The flagship is Clearfield Station at the FrontRunner stop, big enough that it gets its own section below. On the west side, Lakeside Square is rising around Mabey Pond: the northern section carries 296 residential units, 26,500 square feet of commercial, and 16,500 square feet of community space including walking paths, a beach, a kayak launch, and a plaza, with construction that began in fall 2023 running through 2026 and a southern section still in design, an estimated five-plus years out. A pond beach and kayak launch inside Clearfield is the kind of detail nobody expects from this city, and it is real.

Smaller pieces round it out. A 6.92-acre mixed-use project at about 175 W Antelope Drive pairs three commercial lots on the arterial with 55 townhomes behind them; it was in public hearings before the Planning Commission in December 2025 and the City Council in January 2026, so treat it as pending until the council outcome is confirmed. Bravada 193, a newer apartment community at the east end of SR-193, is corridor texture rather than a headline. Every status line in this section moves quarterly, so confirm what is actually under construction and leasing before you count on any of it.

Clearfield never had a historic downtown, so it is building one, on 56-plus acres of UTA-owned land surrounding the FrontRunner station at 1200 S State St. The program is genuinely big for a city this size: up to 1,000 housing units in townhomes and apartments, 550,000 square feet of office, 67,500 square feet of commercial and retail, and a 2.25-acre public park. The developers are STACK Real Estate of Lehi and Hamilton Partners of Salt Lake City, working under an agreement with the Utah Transit Authority, with Mountain West Commercial Real Estate leading the office leasing.

The sequencing matters if you are watching it as a buyer. The infrastructure phase, roads, water, sewer, and landscaping, came first, and the public park opened around October 2024. The first vertical phase, two mixed-use residential buildings totaling 213 apartments from one to three bedrooms, was slated to start construction in spring 2025, with 14,000 square feet of retail wrapping a one-acre public plaza. The announced anchor commercial tenant is The Front Climbing Club, a roughly 37,500-square-foot climbing gym. The full buildout runs in phases over several years, so the honest read is direction, not finish line: the city's core is visibly reorganizing around the train, and homes within walking distance of the station sit closest to whatever that becomes.

Clearfield's signature day is the Fourth of July. The Freedom Festival runs from a dawn Freedom Run through Steed Park's trail system to a 9:30 a.m. Hometown Parade, then an evening festival at Fisher Park with vendors and live entertainment, capped by a fireworks show around 10 p.m. that one event aggregator calls Utah's second-largest; attribute that claim to the aggregator, but locals will tell you it is a serious show either way. June leads up to it with a citywide scavenger hunt and a movie night, the city runs an egg hunt at Fisher and Steed parks each spring, and a downtown farmers market operates seasonally, with the current day and dates on the city's events calendar.

The area's standout free attraction is the Hill Aerospace Museum, a U.S. Air Force heritage museum with more than 70 aircraft across three galleries and an outdoor air park. Locate it honestly: it sits at the northwest corner of Hill AFB with a Roy address, accessed from I-15 exit 338, outside the secure base with no gate pass needed, a few minutes north of Clearfield. For shopping and dining nights, the everyday answer is the Layton Hills Mall and Antelope Drive corridor about ten minutes south, and the bigger open-air option is Station Park in Farmington, roughly twelve miles down I-15 or the West Davis Highway. In-town, the Aquatic Center covered above carries the year-round load, and Steed Pond covers the after-dinner fishing trip.

Clearfield is in the Davis School District, Utah's second-largest, with roughly 72,500 students across 96 schools. Inside the city sit Clearfield High School, with 2,041 students in 2024-25 and the peregrine falcon as its mascot, the Falcons in green and white; North Davis Junior High, rebuilt as part of the same campus project that produced the Aquatic Center; and five elementary schools: Antelope, Holt, South Clearfield, Wasatch, and Hill Field. The boundary lines do not follow the city limits neatly, Doxey Elementary carries a Sunset address on the northern edge, and some Clearfield addresses may feed schools in neighboring cities, so use the district's boundary lookup at davis.k12.ut.us as the authoritative answer for any specific address.

I do not rate schools, and I would steer you away from anyone who tells you which one is best. Boundaries, programs, and ratings are something you should review yourself against what matters to your household. The links below go to the district and to independent sources so you can look at current assignments and ratings directly.

The closest full branch campus is Weber State University's Davis Campus in Layton, roughly ten minutes away, where university materials describe more than 3,800 students taking courses; the main Ogden campus is about twenty minutes north. Davis Technical College is headquartered in Kaysville about eight miles south, and notably operates a training site called Davis Tech Freeport inside the Freeport Center, which puts workforce training physically inside Clearfield; confirm which programs run there on davistech.edu. The city is also home to the Clearfield Job Corps Center at 20 W 1700 S, a federal residential career-training campus with capacity for roughly a thousand students, one of the largest in the nation. Its status is time-sensitive: federal budget action in 2025 proposed closing Job Corps centers nationally, and Clearfield remained open and enrolling through late 2025 amid litigation, so verify its current status before counting on it.

There is no hospital inside Clearfield's city limits, but two full-service hospitals sit in adjacent Layton, both five to ten minutes away. The facility at 1600 W Antelope Drive is a 221-bed acute-care hospital long known as Davis Hospital and Medical Center; CommonSpirit Health materials describe the same Layton facility as Holy Cross Hospital - Davis under its post-2023 branding, with a certified primary stroke center and a Level 3 trauma center, so expect to see both names until the branding settles. Intermountain Layton Hospital at 201 Layton Parkway covers emergency services, labor and delivery, pediatrics, and orthopedics with attached clinics. Larger tertiary care is McKay-Dee Hospital in Ogden about fifteen minutes north, with the University of Utah and Intermountain Medical Center thirty-five to forty-five minutes south.

In town, two verified clinics carry the everyday load: Tanner Clinic - Westside at 1477 N 2000 W, a multi-specialty clinic with extended weekday and Saturday hours, and Midtown Community Health Center at 22 S State St. There is no branded urgent-care storefront with a Clearfield street address per current directories; the nearest dedicated urgent cares are minutes away in Layton, Syracuse, West Point, and Roy. Hill AFB's on-base 75th Medical Group clinic serves base-affiliated patients. Relocating on military orders? The military PCS guide covers the logistics side of that kind of move.

Clearfield's job base is anchored by two giants that get their own sections below: Hill Air Force Base on the eastern boundary, with roughly 27,000 jobs per its 2024 Economic Impact Statement, and the Freeport Center on the southwest side, with about 70 companies and more than 7,000 jobs. Around them sit the everyday public employers, Davis School District and Clearfield City itself, plus the Clearfield Job Corps Center, one of the largest federal career-training campuses in the country, status time-sensitive per the higher-education section above.

Most working residents commute somewhere on the corridor, and the geometry is forgiving: the ACS 2024 five-year mean commute is 21.8 minutes, against daily flows to the base, the Freeport Center, Layton's commercial core, Ogden, and Salt Lake City. FrontRunner from the in-town station is the no-freeway option for the Salt Lake and Ogden ends of that list. The forward-looking piece is Clearfield Station's planned 550,000 square feet of office, which is the city's open bid to add white-collar jobs downtown rather than exporting them every morning. For remote work, the citywide UTOPIA open-access fiber network is a quiet structural advantage; verify availability at the specific address, but this is one of the better-wired cities in the county.

You cannot understand Clearfield without understanding the installation on its eastern boundary. Hill Air Force Base employs 26,893 military, civilian, and contractor personnel per its 2024 Economic Impact Statement, commonly rounded to nearly 27,000, and it is routinely described as Utah's largest single-site employer, more people working on base than for any other employer in the state. The same statement put its total annual economic impact at $12.76 billion: $2.1 billion in government payroll, $4.3 billion in annual expenditures, and more than $6.3 billion in indirect activity. The base hosts the Ogden Air Logistics Complex, the depot-maintenance operation, plus the 388th Fighter Wing and the Reserve 419th Fighter Wing, both flying the F-35A Lightning II. From Clearfield, the West Gate is the front door, reached via SR-193, the city's 700 South. Moving here for a job like this? Our job relocation guide walks through selling, renting, or buying on your timeline.

Two ground-level realities follow from that, and both are geographic facts a buyer should weigh. First, gate traffic surges at shift change on SR-193 near the West Gate; locals plan errands around it. Second, jet noise is real and varies block by block with the F-35 arrival and departure paths. Resident groups in neighboring cities have pressed the base on it, and the base publishes a Noise FAQ and noise-contour studies. The genuinely local move is to visit a home you are serious about at different times of day and read the published contours for that address. No drama in either direction: some streets barely notice the jets, others hear every launch window, and the difference is knowable in advance.

One more thing the base gives the area for free: the Hill Aerospace Museum, more than 70 aircraft across three galleries and an outdoor air park, at the base's northwest corner with a Roy address off I-15 exit 338, outside the secure fence with no gate pass needed, a few minutes north of Clearfield.

The single best story Clearfield owns starts in 1943, when the U.S. Navy built the Clearfield Naval Supply Depot here, a bombproof inland supply base chosen to feed the Pacific Fleet from deep behind the coastline. The depot was phased out by 1962 and converted to private industry as the Freeport Center: today 680 acres, 78 buildings, and more than 7,000,000 square feet of manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution space, with buildings from 4,000 to 400,000 square feet, most of them carrying a rail dock on one side and a truck dock on the other. About 70 companies employ more than 7,000 people inside the fence, and the tenant list is not anonymous: Lifetime Products, the picnic-table, shed, and kayak maker, is headquartered here, alongside Northrop Grumman operations, Don Julio Foods, and Utility Trailer Manufacturing. Davis Tech even runs a training site inside the complex.

For a buyer, the honest version is rhythm and geography. The center sits on the city's southwest quadrant with direct I-15 access and rail service, which means a constant cadence of semis and trains on its perimeter roads, the State Street and 700 South approaches most of all. Homes on the adjacent blocks trade that adjacency for price, and the trade is legitimate either way; just make it knowingly. Drive the street on a weekday, look at the truck routes on a map, and decide what the rhythm is worth to you.

Clearfield is unusually well-plumbed for its size. I-15 runs along the east side with two relevant exits: Exit 334 at SR-193/700 South, the city's own front door and the straight shot to Hill AFB's West Gate, and Exit 332 at SR-108/Antelope Drive, an interchange that physically sits in Layton at Clearfield's south edge and feeds Antelope Drive west across south Clearfield toward Syracuse and the island causeway. State Street, SR-126, is the legacy arterial cutting diagonally through the center, and since January 2024 the West Davis Highway has been the west side's second freeway, covered in its own section below. The transit piece is FrontRunner at Clearfield Station, 1250 S State St, with a free park-and-ride lot: trains run Monday through Saturday, roughly every 30 minutes at weekday peak and hourly off-peak and Saturdays, no Sunday service, south through Salt Lake City to Provo and north to Ogden, from early morning to late evening. Connecting UTA bus routes serve the station; check rideuta.com for the current route list and timetable rather than trusting a stale one.

The ACS puts the mean commute at 21.8 minutes, which fits the geometry: most of the corridor's job centers are one exit, one arterial, or one train ride away. All drive times above are off-peak map estimates, not routing-tool readings, so confirm the ones that matter to you, and remember that I-15 through Davis County moves very differently at rush hour.

On January 6, 2024, UDOT opened the West Davis Highway, SR-177: a 16-mile freeway running from the I-15, US-89, and Legacy Parkway junction in Farmington north through western Davis County to SR-193 in West Point, minutes west of Clearfield. For west-side Clearfield, it changed the daily map. Farmington-and-south trips no longer require merging onto I-15 at all; SR-193 west to West Point is the on-ramp, and the route relieves I-15 for everyone else in the process. The Mabey Pond and West Clearfield areas benefit most directly, which is part of why the west side is where the city's biggest new development is landing. A northward extension was expected to begin construction around 2025; verify its status before treating it as done.

The quieter half of the project is recreational: the corridor included more than ten miles of new paved trail linking the Emigration Trail to the Legacy Parkway Trail, which puts the Great Salt Lake shorelands, the wetland band and its birding country west of West Point and Syracuse, a few minutes from a Clearfield driveway. Pair it with Antelope Drive to the island causeway and the west side suddenly reads less like the back of the city and more like the front porch of the lake.

Clearfield rewards buyers who sort the financing before the search, for a simple market reason: per-source figures show homes here drawing multiple offers even in a softening year, and the buyer whose numbers are already settled moves faster than the one still assembling paperwork. The stock itself adds wrinkles worth flagging early, older post-war homes whose condition drives the appraisal conversation, attached product in new developments with their own review requirements, and investor competition on the entry-level streets.

One honest market note: with Utah's largest single-site employer next door, a meaningful share of buyer questions in Clearfield involve military home-loan benefits. I do not publish loan-type explainers here, that education lives in the mortgage guides on this site, but I can point buyers using those benefits to the right lender resources and make sure the search and the financing run on the same timeline. I am dual-licensed in real estate and lending, and for a Clearfield purchase the partner agent handles the ground game while I stay available on the homework and financing side.