Salary Needed to Live Comfortably in Hattiesburg, MS

To live comfortably in Hattiesburg, you'll need to earn $80,162 a year, which translates to a monthly take-home of $6,680 after taxes. "Comfortably" here means the 50/30/20 framework: your needs are covered, you're setting aside savings, and you have real discretionary spending, not just surviving paycheck to paycheck. That's a meaningful distinction in a city where the cost floor is low but the income ceiling for most jobs is also low.

Compared to the national benchmark of $92,988, Hattiesburg asks for roughly $12,800 less per year. That gap is real and it matters, especially if you're relocating from a high-cost metro. Mississippi does levy a state income tax, so unlike Texas or Florida, you won't get a net-pay boost from a zero-income-tax structure. What you get instead is a lower gross salary requirement to begin with, which achieves a similar effect on your monthly budget without the policy advantage.

Housing anchors the budget at $1,047 a month, which is low by almost any national comparison and reflects Hattiesburg's position as a mid-sized university city without the supply pressure of a major metro. The University of Southern Mississippi drives consistent rental demand in certain corridors, but it hasn't pushed rents into the range you'd see near comparable institutions in larger markets.

Food runs $471 monthly, a figure that reflects the regional reality of shopping at Kroger or Walmart Supercenter rather than specialty grocers. Both operate multiple locations in the Hattiesburg area, and neither carries the price premium you'd find in coastal or urban markets.

Transport is where Hattiesburg's budget diverges from what the housing number might suggest. At $937 a month, it's the second-largest line item, and that's not an accident. Hub City Transit, the city's public bus system, covers limited routes and doesn't serve most of the employment corridors or suburban areas where residents actually live and work. That forces car ownership, and with it comes insurance, fuel, and maintenance costs that don't compress the way rent does. If you're coming from a city where you could ditch a car, budget for that shift explicitly.

Utilities land at $248 monthly, but treat that as an annual average that obscures a real seasonal swing. Entergy Mississippi serves most of the area, and Hattiesburg's humid subtropical climate means air conditioning runs hard from May through September. Summer bills routinely exceed the annual average, which means you'll want a cushion in those months rather than budgeting a flat figure year-round. Healthcare at $464 and other necessities at $173 are both close to regional norms and don't carry the same city-specific explanation.

Hattiesburg's cost geography splits roughly along the north-south axis of US-98 and the suburban sprawl that's pushed outward from the city core over the past two decades.

Oak Grove, the fast-growing suburban corridor to the northwest, carries higher rents and home prices, driven by newer construction, better-rated schools, and the retail density that's followed residential growth. If you have children or want newer housing stock, you'll pay for it there, and you'll also absorb a longer drive to downtown employers or the USM campus.

The areas immediately surrounding the University of Southern Mississippi, particularly along Hardy Street and into the Midtown corridor, offer lower rents and walkable access to campus amenities, but the trade-off is older housing stock and neighborhoods that are still in uneven stages of reinvestment. Petal, just across the Leaf River to the east, sits in a different school district and offers a suburban feel at prices that often undercut Oak Grove, though it adds commute time into central Hattiesburg. The practical question is whether the rent savings in Midtown or Petal offset the transport costs that Hub City Transit can't absorb for you.

The salary gap here is the sharpest thing on this page. The median local salary is $37,750, which is $42,412 short of the $80,162 you need to live comfortably by the 50/30/20 standard. That's not a rounding error. It means the typical Hattiesburg worker is covering needs but not building savings or discretionary cushion at the rate this budget assumes.

Who does well here? Remote workers earning salaries benchmarked to higher-cost markets are the clearest winners. If you're drawing a $90,000 salary from a company headquartered in Atlanta or Chicago and you relocate to Hattiesburg, the cost structure works strongly in your favor. Healthcare professionals, particularly those tied to Forrest General Hospital or the expanding medical corridor along US-49, can find salaries that clear the comfort threshold. So can mid-career professionals in education or government, though those roles cluster toward the lower end of the local wage distribution.

Who will find it a stretch? Anyone entering the local job market at the median or below will be managing a tight budget, not a comfortable one. The one factor the cost data doesn't capture is family infrastructure: Hattiesburg has a relatively dense network of pediatric and family health services for a city its size, which matters if you're moving with young children and weighing total household cost against quality of access.