One Country, Twelve Price Levels: How Far Apart America’s Big Cities Really Are

One currency, many price levels

The BEA’s regional price parities compare what households pay for everything they buy, rent included, with the national average, set at 100. A score of 115 means prices about 15% above the US average. The BEA builds them from the price quotes collected for the consumer price index and from Census Bureau rent data, and 2024 is the latest year published.

Across all 387 metro areas it covers, the range runs from 83.6 in Monroe, Louisiana, to 115.6 in San Francisco–Oakland–Fremont: the dearest is 38% above the cheapest. Set that against the gaps between countries (the two yardsticks are built differently, so read the comparison as approximate):

So the honest version of the claim is this: America’s cities differ about as much as neighbouring rich countries do — Spain and Germany, Portugal and Belgium. They do not differ the way Europe’s richest and poorest economies do, where Denmark’s price level is more than twice Bulgaria’s. For a single market with a single currency, that is still a wide spread. Our guide to Europe’s cheapest countries uses the same Eurostat measure.

For anyone arriving from abroad there is one step before the city. On Eurostat’s comparison, the United States as a whole was 33% above the EU average for household consumption in 2025, down from 43% in 2024 — a fall that coincided with the dollar averaging about 4% less against the euro. Japan was 8% below the EU average in 2025. Those cross-country figures are calculated at market exchange rates, so they move with currencies; the BEA’s city figures, all in dollars, do not. So check how your own currency has moved against the dollar before you compare cities.

“The exchange rate tells you how expensive America is. The city tells you how expensive your America will be.”

It is mostly the rent

Break the BEA’s index into its parts and the 12 big cities draw much closer together. Prices for goods — food, clothing, vehicles and the rest — run from 95 in Phoenix to 110 in New York, a 16% spread. Services other than housing run from 96 in Houston to 109 in Miami. Rents are another matter: Houston’s sit close to the national average, at 105; San Francisco’s are nearly double it, at 195. “Housing rents are often the main driver in differences” in price levels, the BEA notes.

The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey gives the same picture in dollars. Its 2025 figures, released on 29 October, put the median renting household’s gross rent — rent plus utilities and fuel where the tenant pays them — at $1,550 a month in Houston, level with the US median of $1,557, and $2,480 in San Francisco–Oakland.

Where local pay keeps up — and where it doesn’t

High prices matter less if pay is high too. The American Community Survey measures median household income (the household in the middle: half earn more, half less), before tax, for every metro area. Divide it by the BEA price level — the same adjustment the BEA itself describes for incomes — and you get a rough measure of what the middle household’s income buys at national-average prices. Both series are available for 2024:

San Francisco stays on top even after adjusting for its prices, with Washington close behind, then Boston and Seattle. At the bottom sits Miami: the second most expensive of all 387 metro areas, with the lowest median household income of these 12. Houston, the cheapest of the 12, comes second from bottom — low prices, but lower pay to match.

The last column of the first table tells the same story. Measured against what renters there earn, rent takes a similar bite in most of these cities. The ratio is often called the rent burden. In 11 of the 12, the median renting household spent between 28.5% and 33.5% of its income on gross rent in 2025, against 30.9% nationally. (Owners are not in this measure.) San Francisco, with the highest rents, had the lowest share. Miami was the outlier at 38.7%, well above the 30% of income our housing guide describes as a rule of thumb rather than a law.

That is the most useful finding here, and it cuts both ways. If you will earn local pay at a local employer, a city’s rents tend to come with that city’s wages — on these figures, Miami is the exception. If your income is set somewhere else — a scholarship or stipend, a salary paid from abroad, a pension, savings brought from home, or a relocation offer that is not adjusted for the city — nothing offsets the price gap, and you feel all of it.

The cheap-rent cities charge you on the road

The BLS Consumer Expenditure Surveys show where household money actually goes in each metro area, averaged over 2023 and 2024. Shelter — rent, or for owners mortgage interest, property tax and insurance, but not repayments of the loan itself — took 21.8% of household spending in Houston and 27.1% in New York. Transport reversed the order: 19.8% in Houston, 13.6% in New York, where households have 1.2 vehicles on average against 1.7 in Houston.

Add the two lines together and the difference between those two cities all but disappears (our calculation from the published averages): 41.6% of spending in Houston, 40.8% in New York, 40.4% in San Francisco, 39.6% in Dallas. Chicago was lowest of the 12 at 35.4%; Miami highest, at 46.3%. A cheaper rent in a city built around the car is partly paid back at the petrol pump, in insurance and in the price of the car itself.

This site’s city budget templates, which are guideline estimates rather than measurements, lean the same way: housing starts at 26% of take-home pay in Houston against 38% in New York, and transport at 17% against 8%.

The gap may still be moving

Price levels are an annual snapshot; inflation shows how they are shifting. Over the 12 months to September 2026, consumer prices rose 3.7% for the US as a whole — a figure our year-end budget review sets against six other economies. The city readings range widely: 4.5% in New York, 4.4% in Seattle and 4.1% in Washington, but 2.5% in Phoenix and 1.3% in Houston. Six of the 12, including Seattle, Phoenix and Houston, are priced only in even months, so their latest figure is for the year to August.

Treat any single reading with care. The BLS says local indexes have smaller samples and “show greater volatility than the national index”, and that they “do not measure differences in the level of prices among cities” — that is what the BEA’s parities are for. The BEA’s figures for 2025 are due on 10 December.

How to compare two American cities

Whether you are weighing an offer, a university place or a move between two US cities, the data suggest an order of work:

1. Start from take-home pay, not salary. Federal (national) income tax applies everywhere in the US; state and city taxes do not. Texas and Florida levy no personal income tax. Washington has none at present, though a 9.9% tax on income above $1 million takes effect in 2028. New York City residents pay a city income tax on top of the state’s, and the other states on this list, and Washington DC, tax wages at their own rates. Sales tax, added at the till, varies too — our visitor’s guide to US prices covers it.
2. Adjust for the price level. Divide take-home pay by the city’s price level over 100. On the 2024 figures, $5,000 a month after tax in Houston buys roughly what $5,860 does in the San Francisco metro, or $5,710 in New York — for an average household’s basket (our illustration).
3. Price the rent on its own. It is the line that differs most, so check listings for the area you would actually live in against the metro medians above.
4. Decide car or no car. In the sprawling cities the rent saving and the transport bill arrive together.
5. Ask where your income comes from. Local rents tend to follow local pay; money from anywhere else gets no such allowance.