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US cities where the median local salary clears the annual figure needed to live comfortably, ranked by the largest surplus first.
No city qualifies today: across the 100 tracked cities, none has a median local salary at or above the comfortable-living figure. The smallest shortfall is in Cleveland, OH where the local median wage of $59,384 trails the $84,463 needed by $25,079.
What This List Shows
This list is currently empty. Across the 100 US cities tracked by this site, not one has a median local salary that meets or exceeds the figure a resident needs to live comfortably there. The selection rule is strict and straightforward: a city qualifies only when its local median wage clears its own comfortable-living threshold. Nothing in the tracked pool clears that bar today. The closest near-miss is Cleveland, OH, where the local median wage of $59,384 trails the required $84,463 by $25,079. The comfortable-living figure itself comes from the 50/30/20 budget rule, applied to local costs. The gap in Cleveland alone is $25,079.
What This List Means
An empty list is its own finding. It says the shortfall between what US metros require to live comfortably and what local employers actually pay is not a small exception that a handful of cities have solved. It is widespread, and it runs deep. Cleveland is the nearest city to qualifying in the entire tracked pool, yet its median worker still falls $25,079 short of what comfortable living there demands. That is the best case. The national median salary needed to live comfortably, at $97,658, sits even further out of reach. For the list to populate, at least one metro would need its local median wage to rise meaningfully, its required comfortable-living figure to fall meaningfully, or both to move in the same city at the same time. The data does not show that happening anywhere yet. The smallest recorded gap is $25,079.
How to Use This List
An empty list is genuinely unhelpful if you came here searching for a place to relocate on a local salary. What it does tell you is that affordability on local wages is not a search problem with a hidden answer somewhere in the data. Any tracked city where you earn at the local median will leave you short of the comfortable-living threshold. What this finding does not capture is trajectory: some cities may be closing their gaps faster than others, and coverage of tracked metros may expand over time. As a starting point, compare the size of the shortfall across cities rather than looking for a city that fully qualifies. The current floor is a $25,079 gap in Cleveland.
Frequently asked questions
Why does no city qualify for this list right now?
Across the cities CityWage tracks, none has a median local salary that reaches the annual figure needed to live comfortably under the 50/30/20 budget rule. No city qualifies today: across the 100 tracked cities, none has a median local salary at or above the comfortable-living figure. The smallest shortfall is in Cleveland, OH where the local median wage of $59,384 trails the $84,463 needed by $25,079.
Will this list ever populate?
It depends on either local wages rising faster than local costs in a tracked metro, or CityWage adding coverage of cities with stronger wage-to-cost ratios. The list updates automatically as the underlying data changes.
How is the qualifying threshold calculated?
A city qualifies when its median local salary (BLS Occupational Employment Statistics, metro area) is at least the annual salary needed under the 50/30/20 budget rule applied to local cost data (HUD Fair Market Rents for housing, BLS regional data for the other needs categories).