What salary do you need to live in Madison, WI?

Madison housing costs at a glance

Renters in Madison pay a median $1,410 a month for two bedrooms. Size matters: one bedroom is $1,224, three bedrooms $1,663, so going from the smallest to the largest of the three adds $5,268 a year.

The median value of owner-occupied homes in the metro is $372,400. With median household income at $88,804, a typical home costs 4.2× a typical income, close to the middle of the range across US metros.

BEA's Regional Price Parity for the metro is 97.3, where 100 is the US average. In plain terms, the full basket of goods, services and housing costs 2.7% less than average, so $100,000 here buys roughly what $102,789 would at average US prices.

How much you need to earn in Madison

For two bedrooms, $190,000 is where Madison turns Comfortable. Below that, $94,000 marks the start of Okay and $47,000 the start of Tight; under $47,000 the score reads Stretched. Rent at the Comfortable line is 9% of gross pay.

Reaching Royal takes $546,000 — 2.9× the Comfortable line — because the last points come slowly once rent is already a small share.

How they were found: the same scoring function the calculator runs was evaluated at rising incomes until each cutoff was crossed, and the crossing rounded up to a whole $1,000.

What different incomes look like in Madison

At $75,000 home size barely changes the picture: one, two and three bedrooms all grade Tight, with scores from 36 to 41.

Comfortable is above every row of the table here. At $150,000 a two-bedroom still grades Okay, with rent taking 11% of income.

Madison on the national list

On price level Madison is 125th of 387 (1 = most expensive); on two-bedroom rent it is 93rd, and on median home value 93rd. Rent and overall prices don't line up exactly, with prices in the middle half and rent in the top quarter.

Boise City, ID ($1,416) and St. George, UT ($1,409) bracket Madison on two-bedroom rent.

Madison in a Wisconsin context

Compared with Wisconsin as a whole, two-bedroom rent in Madison is 27% higher ($1,410 vs. $1,106) and the median home is 40% higher ($372,400 vs. $266,500).

The Wisconsin figure for the Comfortable line, using state medians, is $133,000 against $190,000 for Madison.

Within Wisconsin, the metros closest to Madison on rent and overall prices are Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI, Milwaukee-Waukesha, WI, and Kenosha, WI. Their Comfortable lines for two bedrooms sit at $239,000, $155,000, and $163,000.

Madison's median income on the scale

A household at the Madison median income of $88,804 would see a two-bedroom score of 43 — Tight — with rent at 19% of income. The Comfortable line is 114% above what the median household makes. Statewide, the Wisconsin median household ($77,485) grades Okay on the state's own medians. Since a household can have two or more earners, compare it with a combined income rather than one paycheck.

All figures are pre-tax estimates from public data, not financial advice.