About

About How Expensive Is

How Expensive Is helps people understand the real cost of living in U.S. cities, and compare any two of them side by side. We built it because most cost-of-living tools either rely on crowd-sourced guesses or hide their numbers behind paywalls.

Every figure on this site is compiled from public, official U.S. datasets and updated as new editions are published. We show our sources openly so you can trust the numbers and check them yourself.

Our data

We use price levels from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, household income and housing figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, and rent benchmarks from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. We apply our own calculations on top of this public data to produce a single, comparable picture for each city.

Independence

How Expensive Is is independent and is not affiliated with any government agency. The site is free to use and supported by advertising.