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They should have also included some rural areas’ home buying prices for perspective against the absurd cost of living in a large city.
Here’s my data to add to the list: bought my house last decade in a rural area, while I was making about $45000 annually, mortgage cost per month is literally off the chart at under $800/mo.
Why? This is a overview of populated areas, since that’s the most… populous. It’s an indicator for people who live in urban areas.
It would be more appropriate to have a second dataset for non-urban areas. imho.
Because the title of the post is “Salary Needed To Buy a Home In The US”
“The US” is a very large country with more rural area than large cities, and there is opportunity for a much lower cost of living out there that people should know about.
Sounds like someone needs a population density map as a reminder of where most of us live…
No I don’t, I already know that most people live in big cities. It’s super obvious to everyone with a tiny bit of education or awareness.
You seem to have missed the point that I’m letting you know about the options that are out there. People assume that it costs $3000 a month to own a house, and it definitely does not. There are houses all over rural America for $100k ballpark price.
Cool I’ll work at the corner store i guess, since there’s no work there
People in rural areas usually commute to work to a larger town. When I was doing that it took me about 30 minutes to commute to work.
I gradually leveled up my career and now I work remote in my home office, and it’s the best possible scenario with my good pay and low cost of living.
Why? Almost no one lives in the rural areas. (Oh look, it’s another electoral college joke.)
Roughly 80% of the population in the US live in urban areas. This graphic is already definitely taking the entire metro area into account, which can include fairly rural areas depending on the city.
People are very aware that rural areas are significantly cheaper. They are cheaper precisely because the demand is low. People either do not want to live there, or they cannot live there given the industry that they work in.
You also need to realize that with a more expensive metro area comes higher median wages, so you’re not necessarily even coming out on top living in a rural area.
Regardless of any of the above assumptions, the title of the post makes what I said relevant and accurate. Refer to the title of the post.
It’s simply not true that good jobs are not available outside of the big cities. How do you think rural people survive? On my road, in a town of far less than 10k residents, there are easily 20-30 houses that are nice as fuck, big brick houses with large yards and well maintained everything. Those people have serious money. Places like that can be found all over the place if you drive through rural America. Likewise you can find shantytowns of poor people in rural areas and cities.
Basically if you have marketable skills, there are jobs all over the place. Taking your skills to where your money goes farther makes life a lot easier. I’m making more than double the amount of money I need to support my family at the moment.
Refer to the title of the info-graphic. Salary required to buy a home in the 50 largest cities in the US.
Obviously people with money exist in rural areas. I never claimed that there were no good jobs. I said if your industry does not exist outside of large cities then you are basically forced to live and work there. Take for example a hardware engineer for a tech company. They absolutely have marketable skills, but the work cannot be done remote thus without changing industries how are they supposed to move to a rural area?
If you have those same marketable skills you can make a ton of money in large cities. Senior software engineers can realistically make $300K or more in nyc. If they go into fintech then they can make absolutely absurd amounts of money. Even in traditionally wealthy neighborhoods like the uws or ues the median household income is $130k. They are not hurting for cash or sacrificing any sort of lifestyle to be there.
Sure but if you live in the city, you have to deal with all the city bullshit, and that’s not worth the potentially higher pay and vastly higher cost of living. I would never live in an apartment again personally unless my financial situation went to shit and that’s all I could afford. City traffic is total ass garbage to deal with, and the crowding of people everywhere, having to wait to get through crowded lines for stuff, the stench of dumpsters in the summer… all that stuff that I never have to deal with here is the value I prefer.
You and I have vastly different experiences of cities. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in a town of 5,000 and I would never even consider moving back to a rural area, or even a suburb. I own a house in a city that is on the list above, but I’d prefer to have an apartment in nyc. As for traffic, live in the right place and you don’t have to drive. I’ve been car free for years. I recognize that is not an option in a lot of US cities, but it should be. I also don’t really have any issue with crowds and I think the trash problem is very exaggerated.
I’m not saying that cities are better for everyone, but a lot of people genuinely prefer them.
I agree there should be a second dataset, but rural areas have their own issues that people might not want to deal with. Like a lack of entertainment and other services.
That all depends on the kind of entertainment and services you want. If you want nightclubs and prostitutes, you need to go to a big city.
If you want freedom, clean air, nature, and the ability to own a home then you need to get out of the big city. For most general goods and services, you can order it online if you don’t have it available. That’s the same everywhere though.
It would be much more useful to see a comparison to income so you could get a better idea of how realistic purchasing a home actually is. For example, Buffalo has cheap homes, but can you get a job there that afford one? And how is the quality of life there? How is crime? Like, it might be the case that San Jose is a better deal or more realistic if salaries are high enough to justify the home price. Because right now, this is more a map of just, what is the overall economy like for each city.
Ah yes, New England is perfectly readable on this graph
The median household income in Portland, OR is $78k and the salary needed to afford a house is $136k?
Yup, sounds about right.
edit: Looks like I should consider moving to Pittsburgh…
My husband and I recently bought a house here in Portland. We’re on two software engineers’ salaries with no kids so we can very much afford it, but it would have been a squeeze without an inheritance from my grandparents. It’s times like these where I truly appreciate the ubiquity of privilege. If they had been your average Black citizen, they would not have been given the opportunities to accumulate the wealth that I then inherited.
Welcome to Portland! Software engineer myself. If you two ever want to grab a drink and commiserate, let me know.
I’d love to! To be clear, we’ve both lived in Portland our whole lives. This is just the first time we’ve owned a home.
My dumbass had a nice 3 bed 2 bath home in NM that I was paying a measley $600 a month as a first time buyer. I then sold it and moved to the Boston area.
I regret everything.
Where in NM, though?
Roswell
Now that insurances against natural disasters start costing a fortune in places like Florida, and you probably have to have such an insurance to get a mortgage there, it, the costs for housing down there will probably skyrocket soon.
I saw a house in Phoenix that was in my price range. I thought, “Wow, this house has a lot of natural light.”
The last photo was a picture of the roof, or lack thereof.
“Price includes 4 walls. Roof is extra.”
*Roof is included with the Bronze subscription Plan at an extra $450 a month.
required salary for fucking 30 years
Tfw all you can afford is the rust belt
I kinda wanna move to Buffalo now.
Don’t worry, there’s a reason for its price
I’d love to know where the houses you can afford on a $140K salary in DC are. Unless house here is loosely defined as a place where you live (apartments, condos), I’m certain this data is flawed.
It says “homes” and not “houses”, so probably apartments and condos indeed
Reading is hard
At min 5% down payment and 140k salary (lets say 100k after taxes), with 1k home expenses per month you’d clock in at max approval of up to $369,178 mortgage, clocking in at a max monthly mortgage of $1,654. Would require a down payment of $19,500
Feel free to check out this link below to see all the valid houses listed on the first realtor website that came up for me, filtered down to normal houses that are at that price point or lower, in DC area
This one in particular is at the very top end of what you can afford, but I’d absolutely buy that house in an instant, decent location, looks gorgeous, etc etc.
with 1k home expenses per month
Lmao. DC is one of the top HCOL cities in the country. I also don’t think your calculation includes any of the taxes, insurance, etc you need for a house.
The first link you shared, literally all of the houses are east of the river. Talk to anyone in this area about recommendations on living in that area.
Second link is MD not DC.
Thanks for doing this research though.
Home expenses is just taxes, electricity/gas/water, maintenance.
Not Cost of Living.
HCOL areas make all of those things more expensive. $1000 for those costs per month is pure fantasy here.
Not really. No. Often they are much cheaper. Gas/electricity is a lot more expensive in low cost of living areas, due to transport costs.
$1000 or so is pretty normal in big cities for monthly house costs, most of which is utilities. If your utility bill is over a thousand dollars you either own a tesla, mine crypto, or grow hydroponics.
Or the other handful of expensive hobbies of course. Aquariums, 3d printing, so on and so forth.
Taxes usually are like 200-250.
Maint should be ~100/month if you got a proper inspection done and ensured there aren’t any serious issues.
This doesn’t include major maintenance not all houses need, like new roof, new water heater, new furnace, new AC, etc. Just general passive maintenance.
That number is purely “how much does the house cost to not get foreclosed” which is what banks care about.
Dude I live in DC. I’m telling you what the reality is here. $1000 will not cover those costs
DC rates atm are average of ~3.5k property taxes, quite low electric rate at 15 cents, gas at ~$1.50
DC’s utility rates are extremely low and very affordable, and property taxes are a smidge on the high side but not that high (about $300/month)
So maybe closer to $1,100 instead of $1000
These are hard numbers a person can literally look up, so I have no idea wtf you are talking about, those numbers are very low for a city.
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I want to see Honolulu
What the fuck America is so Goddamned cheap.
Huh? A typical salary here couldn’t afford any of these. 0.
We’ve literally made our society completely dependent on marriage/dual income. For those of us that are perpetually single and don’t have a WFH tech job that could go anywhere, homeownership is as obtainable as a unicorn.
Just making sure you know the prices listed aren’t home prices, it’s the buyer’s necessary minimum annual salary to purchase the house. Unless you’re Australian, in which case America is actually cheap by comparison
Also cheap compared to Canada, especially around the great lakes region. Across the lake in Canada is one of the most unaffordable places to live in the country, along with the southwest coast
That’s not home price, that’s salary requirements.a house in San Jose costs $1.6 million, not $375 thousand. You’re paying about $9 thousand a month before taxes.
Interesting, where are you living?
Compare the median salaries in those places to chart, doesnt seem very cheap to me.
I live in phoenix.
Less than 7% of people make enough to buy a home per this chart.
This is just not realistic.
Using the median home price is severely underestimating the cost of a decent home in an okay neighborhood.
With these salaries, you can afford a house that needs severe repairs or in either an unsafe or really inconvenient area.
I bought a house in one of these cities in 2017 with slightly more than what they say is the required salary. It was 195k with 4.5%. The school district reassessed the house from the sale, my taxes skyrocketed, and my mortgage increased $600 a month. I ended up selling the house after 3 years to move in my parents with 25k in credit card debt.
Today, that house would cost at least 300k and interest rates are around 8%. I’ve almost tripled my salary since then and my budget is probably max 330k.
why the hell is Pittsburgh Pennsylvania so cheap?
Probably because per the 2021 census stats, 20% of residents are below the poverty line and the median household income was only 54k.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/pittsburghcitypennsylvania/PST045222
I’m sure the high rate of hard drug usage doesn’t help everyone’s situation there either.
yes this AND crime. definitely don’t move there. is really bad, you’ll hate it until you’re killed by random violence.
bro fuck those goofy ass roads over there. wonky ass hilly ass city
Because we tell everyone the Midwest is terrible to keep it that way.
the Midwest is so bad! stay out at the coast, def don’t move there. it’s so dangerous and stuff.
gun violence, hard drugs, etc…
I might have to come check that place out to be honest
It’s funny because living on the West Coast, we tell people the same thing to scare them away, but when you say it about the Midwest, I suspect you’re actually being truthful.
You should go there and see lol tell us what you find.
If it was easier for me to do I would
shh! don’t talk about it
