Daily Maps · September 11, 2026 · Archive
36 counties where the median home costs six years of the median income
Thirty-six counties, out of 3,219 with data, have a median home worth at least six times the median household income. The steepest is Kings County, New York (Brooklyn) at 10.3 years of income, followed by Teton County, Wyoming at 9.1, the Bronx at 8.9, Nantucket at 8.8 and San Francisco at 8.4. The pattern is two kinds of places: big coastal metros where incomes are high but prices are higher, and resort counties where the people who own the homes do not earn their living there. Most of the country sits between two and four years of income.
How to read this map
The map sets one range on the county data: Home Value to Income Ratio from 6.0x income to 99.0x income. A county is drawn solid navy when it falls inside every range, dotted when it misses one, and hatched when it reports no figure for one of the measures, so a hatched county is neither a match nor a miss. Recounted today from the county database, 36 of the 3,210 counties with a figure for every range fall inside all of them, and California has the most with 16. The count in the title is the count on the day the map ran; the two can differ when a source is refreshed.
The figures are the same ones behind every county page on this site: Census population and household income, Zillow home values, HUD fair market rents, County Health Rankings measures of crime and health, NOAA temperatures and USDA amenity scores, each stored with its publication year and listed below for this map. "Play with this map" opens the live county map with these ranges already set, so you can move a handle and watch the count change; "Make your own" starts from a blank map.
Sources
- Zillow ZHVI 2024 (median home value)
- Census ACS 2022 (median household income)
- Ratio derived by Live or Die Here
Solid navy marks counties inside every range on this map, dotted counties miss one or all of them, and hatched counties have no figure for that measure. On a heatmap, darker means higher and faded counties fall outside the range.