Price-to-Income Ratio
Median home value measured against median household income in the same place, expressed as years of income.
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How expensive local housing is relative to what local households earn, expressed as years of income to buy the median home.
This is our own estimate. It is not a figure the Census Bureau publishes. We combine two measures the Bureau does publish for the same tract and the same estimate period — home value (Census) and median household income — and the Bureau is the source of that original data only. It is not responsible for our calculation.
Value is the owner's own assessment, not a transaction price: "Value is the respondent's estimate of how much the property (house and lot, mobile home and lot (if lot owned), or condominium unit) would sell for if it were for sale" (ACS Subject Definitions). Household income "includes the income of the householder and all other individuals 15 years old and over in the household, whether they are related to the householder or not."
A price level on its own says little about affordability, because expensive places often pay well. Measuring price against local income puts a high-cost, high-wage tract and a low-cost, low-wage tract on the same footing.
Metrics in this family#
Price-to-income ratio
The current ratio, from the most recent ACS 5-year vintage.
Price-to-income trend
Change in the ratio over 2 or 4 years, selectable in the tool. Because the ratio is a level rather than a rate, its trend is reported as a percentage change. The trend moves when prices and incomes move apart, and a flat trend can mean both were flat or both rose together.
Considerations#
The ratio is our derivation, so it inherits every limitation of both inputs and adds one of its own: the two medians describe different, only partly overlapping populations. Median home value covers owner-occupied units; median household income covers all households in the tract, owners and renters alike. In a tract where owners and renters differ sharply in income, the ratio is not the ratio any single household faces.
Both inputs are medians, so the ratio is a ratio of medians rather than a median of ratios. It describes the tract in aggregate, not a typical buyer.
A value is produced only where the Bureau published both inputs for the tract. Tracts with few owner-occupied units frequently lack a published median home value and so have no ratio.
Trend windows here are shorter than on most other families because both inputs must come from the same estimate period, and the run of comparable periods on current tract boundaries is still short. The 4-year window compares the 2020–2024 estimate period with the 2016–2020 period; the 2-year window compares 2020–2024 with 2018–2022. Those periods overlap, so short-window movement is damped.
Census tract boundaries were redrawn for the 2020 census — see geography.
References#
- 1ACS Subject Definitionshttps://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/tech_docs/subject_definitions/2024_ACSSubjectDefinitions.pdf