Price levels and inflation
Regional Price Parities (RPPs) compare prices across places in the same year. An index of 110 means prices are 10% above the U.S. level; 90 means 10% below. RPP measures relative price levels, while CPI measures price change over time. All RPP components are reproduced from their BEA descriptions: all items, goods, services: housing, services: utilities and services: other. Housing refers to rents. Component indexes cannot be added or interpreted as budget shares. The 2008–2024 chart tracks relative prices, not cumulative inflation.
County rent aggregation
Fair Market Rent (FMR) is HUD’s estimate of the 40th percentile gross rent for standard-quality rental homes occupied by recent movers. It includes rent and most tenant-paid utilities. A household’s actual rent can differ substantially by neighborhood, lease and property. HUD identifiers contain a two-digit state code, three-digit county code and five-digit town code. A county row ending in 99999 takes precedence. Otherwise, town rents are averaged using pop2024 and the town populations are summed. Counties are matched to ACS by five-digit FIPS, including Connecticut planning regions. HUD’s synthetic code 29056 is explicitly labeled as the Sullivan city part of Crawford County. It is recombined with code 29055 by population weights; it is not treated as a separate county. No other geographic crosswalk is invented for unmatched records.
State, national and metro rent
State and metro rent is the population-weighted mean of member-county FMRs. National comparison tables use the same weighted mean. The home-page U.S. median benchmark is the county 2BR FMR at which cumulative HUD population reaches half of the matched total. It is a population-weighted median of area benchmarks, not a median of U.S. leases. Rent ranks include only counties with HUD population of at least 20,000.
Income and homeownership
State, county and U.S. household income and owner-occupied home value are published ACS 2020–2024 five-year estimates. Median real estate taxes paid refer to owner-occupied homes (B25103). Tenure counts come from B25003. Negative Census sentinel values are treated as missing, and missing values display as “not reported.” A + identifies a top-coded home value or tax estimate. ACS sampling error remains; close differences should not be overinterpreted.
Ratios are comparison tools
Annual benchmark rent is 12 times the 2BR FMR. Rent / income divides this by median household income and multiplies by 100. Income after rent subtracts annual benchmark rent from median household income. These combine FY2027 rents with ACS 2020–2024 incomes; no inflation adjustment is applied. They describe neither a typical renter household nor observed cost burden. The home-page donut counts counties by this ratio, giving each county equal weight.
Metro boundaries and income
Counties are assigned through Census July 2023 metropolitan CBSA codes, excluding micropolitan areas. Metro income is a population-weighted mean of available county median incomes, not a pooled metro median. Weights use HUD pop2024 and omit missing observations separately for each measure. An unmatched BEA metro retains its RPP data and is noindexed if county membership is unavailable. Metro RPP is shown on member-county pages only as regional context.
CPI calculation
Only CUUR NSA all-items SA0 CPI-U series are used. Twelve-month inflation equals (latest monthly index / same month one year earlier − 1) × 100. The latest observation is selected separately for each area, and the month is displayed. If the year-earlier month is absent, that latest-month change is not reported. A separately dated latest comparable change is also calculated. When a year-earlier observation is absent, the home-page national inflation card uses the latest comparable month and labels its date rather than filling that gap. Annual trends use published M13 annual averages from 2015, excluding partial years. Metro CPI coverage may retain older names or differ from current CBSA boundaries. A limited explicit mapping is used for comparable metro areas; Urban Alaska and Urban Hawaii are not assigned to individual metros.
Coverage and related links
County pages remain available but are noindexed when ACS income is missing, HUD population is unavailable or population is below 5,000. All noindex pages are excluded from the sitemap. Related CountyTaxFacts URLs are verified against its content files. JobPayFacts state and metro URLs are verified against its Hugo content adapters and the corresponding data records. Average wages describe individual jobs and are not interchangeable with household income.