Salary Needed To Buy a Home In The US
Salary Needed To Buy a Home In The US
100 comments
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What is the size of the “median” home in each area? Single family, or townhome, or condo?
Given that this appears to be a median average, this graphic does not account for the extremely wide variance depending on the cases above. A two bedroom condo and a five bedroom single family home could easily have a $2000/mo variance in the mortgage cost.
The other item that would perhaps be useful would be to call out what the down payment requirement is for each of these areas; ie, you can only achieve a $3000/mo mortgage if you’ve also put down $140,000, which is unachievable for over 90% of the country.
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From the Bay Area, $1.5M will get you a two bed one bath or three bed 1.5 bath home built in 1925 or so. You can buy in a lower end neighborhood for a little less or a higher end one for a bit more, but the standard is going to be a craftsman home from 1906 with a driveway if you’re lucky.
I think the graphic also used a 20% down payment and a slightly over 6% mortgage in the calculation.
I just want to retire and move someplace cheap, like NYC or London.
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There is no way that this graphic isn’t including the entire metro area. The city I currently live in is on the list and so is the city that I am planning to relocate to. Prices shown do not accurately reflect the prices of houses/condos that I would consider “in the city”.
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Yep. You're not getting any kind of stand-alone home in D.C. for $139k salary unless it's a huge piece of crap.
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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.
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“Price includes 4 walls. Roof is extra.”
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*Roof is included with the Bronze subscription Plan at an extra $450 a month.
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lmao cries in San Jose
I mean, the thing is, it's not even that great a city. Like, sure the tech jobs are here, and the bay area overall is nice and has temperate weather, but San Jose itself is a giant sprawling suburb. Downtown is "okay" and we do have public transit in the form of the light rail but it's pretty slow.
I'm paying $3.4k to rent a 2x2.5 townhome with my partner currently. It's very nice, and my landlords are just a very nice couple rather than a company, but dang is it expensive just to live here.
And before anyone asks, I live here 1) because I work in tech and the jobs are here, and 2) because my family all lives in the Bay Area and they're very important to me.
Anyway, my formal recommendation to any of you looking to move to San Jose is to basically not do that. Find a remote job and work in tech that way, or hybrid so you can live further out and commute only a couple times a week.
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I saved for a few years, and every amount I saved was offset by the housing prices going up. I eventually had $300K saved up and couldn’t afford the down payment on a family home.
That’s just completely and utterly unsustainable. I live in San Diego County now, which isn’t a whole lot better.
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My family was renting a house is S.D for more than a decade. They got booted when the son-in-law of the owner stuck her in a retirement home and needed to pay for it with the house. (Speculation from what we were told, and put together)
It was a shitty, shitty, home. Carpets were gross and floor underneath likely needs to be redone. Kitchen is from the 50's or 60's but with 90's appliances. It had a bad linoleum floor, with completely out of date cabinets and faux bricks that had been painted over a bunch of times. Place likely needed new plumbing and definitely new electrical. The roof needed work; there was likely mold in the bathroom including places in the wall that were squishy. The yard was small and filled in with broken bits of concrete mixed with clay.
It was sold for more than $750,000
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I like San Jose - it's a cozy-sized city with all the arts. I just could never scrape together enough money for a house.
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I work in tech as well and can still barely afford most of the rent prices I see here. It’s horrible.
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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.
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It says "homes" and not "houses", so probably apartments and condos indeed
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Reading is hard
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It's gotta include condos....any condos. Like studio sized condo from the 60s in a dumpy building with neighbors that have 3 families living in a one bedroom
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Where in NM, though?
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Roswell
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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.
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why the hell is Pittsburgh Pennsylvania so cheap?
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bro fuck those goofy ass roads over there. wonky ass hilly ass city
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Because we tell everyone the Midwest is terrible to keep it that way.
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I might have to come check that place out to be honest
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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.
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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...
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You should go there and see lol tell us what you find.
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If it was easier for me to do I would
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shh! don't talk about it
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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.
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yes this AND crime. definitely don't move there. is really bad, you'll hate it until you're killed by random violence.
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median price home
So I nice mid life house...
Median price homes aren't affordable, start home and median price home are mutually exclusive.
Median price home literally is going to be about the halfway point between a starter home and a fucking mansion
It boils my blood everytime I see these info dumps starting off with average or medium house prices.
That's not a fucking starter home price.
It's like looking at the median price of a car and then trying to say that cars aren't affordable for your first car.
You don't spend 20k to 30k in your first car, you buy near the bottom percentile as your starter. Your first car is like a fraction of the cost of the median.
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Exactly. The median purchase price for new cars is ~$45k or something, yet I'd never spend that much despite making more than median salary. Things don't scale like that.
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But what should be a starter home is also increased...unless you like manufactured homes...which is also expensive >.>
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Not sure what you are talking about. Starter homes are still the same. Basic features, unfinished basement, no garage, 2-3 beds, 1-2 baths, likely 20-30 years old and requires some repairs.
Typically will be farther out of the city. It will be a longer commute but still within city limits. It will have some amenities nearby but not exactly on main street, but enough to suffice.
For most large cities I have looked at, usually is in the range of 150k to 250k. Totally affordable for someone making a decent wage of 50k+ to save up the down payment of 7.5k to 12.5k over the course of 1-2 years.
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Tfw all you can afford is the rust belt
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Good luck buying a house in Seattle on a $170,000 salary. It's going to be a beat-down, tiny thing, with no yard, in a questionable area.
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They should include the interest rate they are using to calculate the mortgage. Based on what's provided they are assuming around a 6% mortgage which is no longer available. Tack an extra $1,000 monthly payment onto that million dollar home and an extra $40,000 to your income to make it affordable. (Assuming debt/income ratio and income taxes)
Did I miss anything?
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They did it’s at the bottom. 6.37%
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Which, having literally just bought a home, is a supremely optimistic rate to get right now. We spent $10k buying down our interest and only managed 6.9%
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This is beautiful! Does anyone know the software used to create this visualization?
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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...
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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.
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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.
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I want to see Honolulu
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Wait till they find out it's likely harder to rent in many areas, too, thanks to the new ratio requirement.
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Ah yes, New England is perfectly readable on this graph
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I like to joke that I moved from the SF Bay Area to Seattle for the affordable housing, but it's funny because it's true.
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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.
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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.
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required salary for fucking 30 years
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At current interest rates, 5% down, and an 800 credit score, you're monthly piti is still like 2,700. Assuming you make that 92k/yr, and are traded at 22%, you're monthly take home is 5900. That's 45 percent of your monthly income. "Affordability" is for dinner heavy lifting here
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The sadistic choice of the US:
Barely scrape by in "luxury cities" where non-millionaires are an afterthought. But at least you'll have an easier time meeting fellow "undesirables".
Have slightly more money that will mostly just go to paying for a car to traverse car-dependent hell...but you have to have vapid neo-nazis for neighbors.
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Hey are you like 15?
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What the fuck America is so Goddamned cheap.
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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.
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Interesting, where are you living?
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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100 comments