The income you need to buy a home in the 50 largest US metros

What the numbers show

• $109,508is the median income required across the 50 largest metros — the midpoint of the list, not an average, so it is a real metro’s figure rather than a blend.
• 32 of the 50 metros now require a six-figure income to buy the typical home on conventional underwriting limits, and 6 require more than $200,000.
• The spread is 6.4×: San Jose, CA at $415,694 against Memphis, TN at $64,710. The same household income buys a very different life depending only on where it is earned.
• The four most expensive metros are all in California, despite the state having one of the lower median effective property-tax rates in the country — home prices, not taxes, drive the ranking.
• Property tax is not a rounding error. In San Jose, CA it adds $937 a month; the state rate applied is 0.71% of home value a year.

All 50 metros, ranked by income required

Monthly payment is principal, interest, property tax and home insurance. It excludes HOA dues and maintenance, which vary too much between individual homes to estimate at metro level.

How this was calculated

Every figure above is produced by the same calculation engine that powers the mortgage calculator on this site, running over the datasets listed below. Nothing was entered by hand, so the study and the tools agree by construction — you can reproduce any row by entering its home price and rate into the calculator yourself.

What is assumed

These are modelling choices, not measurements. They are stated so the result can be argued with:

• 20% down. Not because most buyers put that much down — most do not — but because it removes mortgage insurance from the comparison. PMI depends on credit score and lender, so including it would make 50 metros differ by something that has nothing to do with geography.
• 28% of gross income on housing. The conventional front-end underwriting limit. Because the calculation assumes no other debt, this is the binding constraint rather than the 36% back-end limit — adding a car payment would make the answer depend on an invented car payment.
• A 30-year fixed-rate loan at the current national average rate, applied uniformly. Real quoted rates vary by borrower and by lender.
• Home insurance at 0.45% of home value a year. This one is an assumption rather than a sourced figure, and it is flagged as such. It is the rate implied by this site’s own mortgage calculator defaults, so the study and the tool do not quietly contradict each other. Real premiums vary enormously — Florida and Louisiana especially.
• The primary state’s property-tax rate.Several of these metros cross state lines: the New York metro reaches into New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The rate applied is the primary state’s median effective rate, not an area-weighted blend, and county rates within a state vary widely around it.
• Typical home value, not median sale price.Zillow’s index tracks the value of the whole housing stock rather than only what changed hands last month, so it does not swing with the mix of what happened to sell. It is the more stable basis for comparing metros, and it is not the same number as a median sale price.

Sources

• Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI), all homes, smoothed and seasonally adjusted — published 2026-06, verified 2026-08-10
• Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey — 30-year fixed rate — published 2026-08-06, verified 2026-08-10
• Tax Foundation / U.S. Census ACS — median effective property tax rates by state — published 2026-01, verified 2026-07-03