Pittsburgh has cracked a national business publication's top 10 U.S. metropolitan areas as a potential site for companies looking to expand or relocate.

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The bimonthly magazine Expansion Management ranked the region ninth among 362 metro areas in its fourth annual list of the best places to locate a company.

The Cleveland-based publication's so-called "Mayor's Challenge'' is based on education, health-care costs, quality of life, transportation and work force, opportunities for engineers and scientists, taxes and government spending, and supplemented by a survey of corporate site consultants to gauge their perceptions.

"Few if any cities rank extremely high in all categories," said Expansion Management chief editor Bill King. "But cities like Pittsburgh, Austin, [Texas] and Raleigh-Cary, [N.C.] do well in just about every area."

PITTSBURGH HITS TOP 10

Top 10 U.S. metropolitan areas for businesses to locate, according to Expansion Management magazine:

1.   Austin-Round Rock, Texas

2.   Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, Minn.

3.   Raleigh-Cary, N.C.

4.   Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas

5.   Houston-Baytown-Sugar Land, Texas

6.   Washington, D.C.-Arlington-Alexandria, Va.

7.   Madison, Wis.

8.   Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, Wash.

9.   PITTSBURGH

10.  Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, Ariz.

Pittsburgh achieved its top-10 overall ranking by landing in the top 20 percent in four categories, and perhaps just as importantly, not landing in the bottom 20 percent for any.

Pittsburgh scored in the top fifth for its health-care costs, transportation, work force availability and costs, and other related issues; quality of life; and knowledge workers -- measured by such factors as concentration of science and engineering graduates among the overall work force; the number of patents issued per capita; the number of colleges and universities; and the amount of research and development spending.

It narrowly escaped landing in the bottom fifth for taxes and government spending, a category that focuses on how the state in which a city is located invests its tax dollars.

Mr. King said that most states suffer from "years, if not decades of deferred maintenance" for such items as bridges and highways.

Where Pittsburgh ranked, out of 362 metropolitan areas:

Health care costs - 10th

Logistics infrastructure - 18th

Quality of life - 53rd

Knowledge workers - 58th

Public Schools - 96th

Topping the overall top 10 was Austin, followed by No. 2 Minneapolis-St. Paul, and No. 3 Raleigh-Cary. N.C., Pittsburgh ranked just behind No. 8 Seattle and just ahead of No. 10 Phoenix.

Noticeably absent from the top 10 were megacities such as New York and Los Angeles.

"Big cities score high in logistics infrastructure, and in knowledge workers," Mr. King said. "But 75 percent of our readers are manufacturers, and for them costs are very important. That's what drops [big cities] out of the top 10."