Where can your income live best?

How the score works

Three measures go into each area's LivingScore. Rent burden is the area's median gross rent for the home size you pick (one, two or three bedrooms), times twelve, divided by your income. Price-to-income is the median value of owner-occupied homes divided by your income. Purchasing power is BEA's Regional Price Parity, where the US average is 100.

Rent burden counts for 50% of the score, price-to-income for 30% and purchasing power for 20%. Rent burden scores 100 at 2% of income or less and 0 at 50% or more; price-to-income scores 100 at 1.5× or less and 0 at 15.0× or more, both on a logarithmic scale in between. The price parity scores 100 at 85 and 0 at 115. HUD treats renters who spend more than 30% of income on housing as cost-burdened, and that line sits well inside the rent range here.

The grades are cut from the LivingScore: Royal 85+, Comfortable 65–84, Okay 45–64, Tight 25–44, Stretched 0–24. They describe how much room your income has in a place, not the place itself — the same metro can be Royal for one income and Stretched for another.

A worked example: $80,000 in two very different metros

Take $80,000 a year and a two-bedroom home. In San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA, the median two-bedroom gross rent is $2,680 a month, so a year of rent would use 40% of that income. The median home is valued at $1.14M, 14.3× the income, and the price parity is 115.6, so $80,000 buys about what $69,196 would at average US prices. The score lands at 4, which is Stretched.

In San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX the same two-bedroom rent median is $1,389, or 21% of income, the median home is $278,800 (3.5× income), and the parity of 94.7 makes $80,000 feel like $84,463. That scores 46, Okay. Nothing about either city changed between the two sentences; only where the income was spent did.

How one income spreads across the country

At $80,000 with two bedrooms, 7% of metros come out Comfortable or better, 58% Okay, 29% Tight and 6% Stretched. At $150,000 the Comfortable-or-better share rises to 62%. Price levels alone vary a lot: San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA has the highest metro price parity at 115.6, while Monroe, LA has the lowest at 83.6.

Because rent and home prices are compared to your own income, the ranking order barely moves as income changes, but the grades do. That is the point of the tool: to show where a given income has slack, not to rank places as better or worse to live.

Where the numbers come from

Price levels are the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities for 2024, "All items", from the state and metropolitan tables released February 19, 2026. Rents are Census American Community Survey 2020-2024 5-year estimates, table B25031 (median gross rent by bedrooms); home values are table B25077 (median value of owner-occupied housing units). Median household income from table B19013 is shown for context only and is not part of the score.

The two sources are joined by metro (CBSA) code, never by name. All 387 metros in the BEA table matched an ACS area; micropolitan areas and Puerto Rico are not in the BEA table, so they are not scored. Files were downloaded 2026-10-30. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA reports its three-bedroom median gross rent as $3,500+, the top of the Census range, so the tool uses $3,500 there and marks it.

What the score leaves out

Everything here uses pre-tax income. State and local income taxes differ a lot, so the same gross income leaves different amounts to spend; none of that is in the score. Metro medians also hide big differences inside an area: a downtown two-bedroom and one at the far edge of the same metro can differ by more than the gap between two metros.

A median gross rent by bedrooms is what current renters of that size of home pay, including utilities they pay for, across everyone who rents, including people who signed leases years ago. Asking rents for a vacant apartment today are usually higher. The ACS figures are five-year averages, so they trail recent price changes.

This is an estimate built from public statistics, not financial, tax or relocation advice. Use it to see where an income has more or less room, then check real listings and your own costs before deciding anything.