A new housing affordability index from the University of San Diego reveals that the total cost of homeownership surpassed renters’ income in some of the nation’s largest metros at the end of 2025. As the data shows, there’s a lot more that goes into the housing affordability equation that can make—or break—homebuyers’ ability to purchase a home.
The Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate at USD’s Knauss School of Business developed the quarterly index, launched in late April, to capture the true all-in costs to jump from renting to homeownership. And after principal, interest, insurance, taxes and utilities are factored in, the new data proves just how far housing costs have outpaced many Americans’ earnings.
High-cost California has some of the highest ratios of homeownership costs compared to renter income. In the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro, total annual homeownership costs on a median-priced home—$961,027 per Zillow—run $72,473, or 100.2% of the area’s median household income of $72,301 for renters. The mortgage payment alone accounts for 80% of that income; property taxes are another 13.3 percentage points.
In San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, where typical home values top $1.6 million, total homeownership costs account for 98% of median renter income. San Francisco is close behind at 90.6%.
New York-Newark-Jersey City is at 87.6%—driven by a property tax burden equal to 16.6% of renter income, the highest in the dataset. Providence, Rhode Island, at 83.%, and Boston at 77.2% round out the top markets where total costs eat up more than 75% of renter household income.
It’s worth noting that financial experts recommend borrowers keep their front-end debt-to-income ratio, which accounts for just housing costs, below 28% of gross household income. The above figures blow that well-meaning guidance out of the water.
At the more affordable end of the index, Pittsburgh has the lowest ratios among the 50 largest metros at 44.3% of renter income. Memphis, Birmingham and Oklahoma City are all below 47%.
| Rank | Metro | Most affordable | |
| 1 | Johnstown, Pennsylvania | 26.20% | |
| 2 | Enid, Oklahoma | 27.57% | |
| 3 | Danville, Illinois | 28.18% | |
| 4 | Pine Bluff, Arkansas | 28.78% | |
| 5 | Cumberland, Maryland-West Virginia | 28.96% | |
| 6 | Lawton, Oklahoma | 31.32% | |
| 7 | Weirton-Steubenville, West Virginia-Ohio | 31.91% | |
| 8 | Charleston, West Virginia | 33.46% | |
| 9 | Battle Creek, Michigan | 34.07% | |
| 10 | Decatur, Illinois | 34.28% | |
| 11 | Bay City, Michigan | 34.90% | |
| 12 | Elmira, New York | 35.11% | |
| 13 | Beckley, West Virginia | 35.95% | |
| 14 | Goldsboro, North Carolina | 36.11% | |
| 15 | Altoona, Pennsylvania | 36.11% | |
| 16 | Mansfield, Ohio | 36.28% | |
| 17 | Monroe, Louisiana | 36.48% | |
| 18 | Elizabethtown, Kentucky | 37.06% | |
| 19 | Beaumont-Port Arthur, Texas | 37.34% | |
| 20 | Albany, Georgia | 37.53% |
Notably, in many of these cities the median home price is only a fraction of the national average—$94,802 in Johnstown, for instance. In Elizabethtown, the median home price stands at $252,068, but renter incomes are also higher, at $55,834.
According to the study, “the most affordable housing markets tend to be those with less dense populations, sometimes with declining or stagnant populations and stale economies. Some of these are turning around with new demand from locationally free workers. The question is whether businesses will take advantage of these more affordable markets when making operational location decisions.”
Still, USD’s data shows that very few cities are exempt from affordability pressure; only 32 out of 285 markets in the index require renters to put less than 40% of their gross household income toward total ownership costs.
Surging home insurance costs are increasingly a larger part of the affordability calculus in areas more prone to natural disasters. Since 2021, the average cost of home insurance has surged nearly three times as fast as inflation (46% vs. 16%), according to data from Insurify.
In the New Orleans-Metairie metro, for instance, home insurance premiums account for a staggering 8.8% share of renters’ median income—even though the overall ownership cost-to-income share was 56%, the USD index found.
Most of the areas with the highest insurance bills compared to area renter income were located in the Gulf Coast, Tornado Alley and parts of Florida. As insurance premiums rise and policies become harder to find, potential buyers in these areas face another cost consideration.
