What can you rent in U.S. cities with the median graduate salary?

In your student years, you might happily live in your corner of an eight-person shoebox, waiting your turn for a weekly shower and learning to stack tall piles of dirty dishes in the smallest possible footprint.

As a graduate, both your professional lifestyle and your dignity call for a little bit more. But burdened with student debt and up against a national housing crisis, graduates are making some tough choices. “A lot of people are just trying to catch up,” Orlando renter Daniel Levine told WESH. “You know, they just got into their profession. I have a friend that is an attorney, and it's just like, 'I'm drowning in debt, and I can't really afford to live downtown.' So he moved back in with his parents, and he's saving money.”

Across the U.S., rent levels are 22% higher than pre-pandemic levels, and half of renters have been stuck with rents they can’t afford. But neither rent costs, wages nor housing availability are the same all over, so new entrants to the job market must balance potential earnings against the number and cost of local rental listings when figuring out where to settle.

To help you find the right direction, Career.io has found which cities have the most and least rentals available at an affordable rate, given the local average graduate wage — and the cities where you’ll get the most square footage for your graduate paycheck.

What we did

We took the average bachelor’s degree-level monthly earnings for the 100 most populated cities across America from the United States Census Bureau. We also determined the average rent budget on these salaries using the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s assertion that rent affordability is calculated at 30% of gross income. Then, we analyzed every Zillow property available at or below this 30% rate in each of these cities to find what percentage of available properties the average graduate can afford and the average size of affordable rentals in each city.

Key findings

• In Shreveport, Louisiana, 85.40% of available properties are affordable on the local average graduate salary — the best availability of any city.

• There are no affordable properties available to the graduate on average salary in Irvine (California), Santa Fe (New Mexico) or the New Jersey cities of Paterson and Elizabeth.

• The biggest average property available on the local average graduate salary is in Frisco, Texas (1,509 sq. ft.)

• The smallest average property available on the average graduate salary is in Honolulu, Hawaii (395 sq. ft.)

The U.S. cities where the average graduate salary can afford to rent the most properties

We found just six large cities where more than three-quarters of available properties are affordable on the local average graduate salary. The Midwest states of Ohio, Iowa and Missouri are best served, with three top 20 cities for availability in each of these states. But the cities with the best availability of all are Shreveport, Louisiana (85.40%), Topeka, Kansas (83.75%), and Waterbury, Connecticut (83.44%).

Shreveport’s biggest employers are Barksdale Airforce (14,023 employees) and the Willis-Knighton Medical Center (7,374). But the city is also admired for its manufacturing industry, boasting a potential workforce of 350,000 workers and 40,000 students within a 60-minute drive. Graduates can hope to find a home with 1,130 sq. ft. on the average local salary. This makes Shreveport an attractive alternative to New Orleans, where a worker needs to earn more than $3/hour more than in Shreveport to afford decent housing.

The U.S. cities where the average graduate salary can afford to rent the fewest properties

There are four large U.S. cities with no affordable rentals for someone on the local average graduate salary: Irvine (California), Santa Fe (New Mexico) and Paterson and Elizabeth (both New Jersey). California has the most cities in the bottom 20, with Santa Ana, Anaheim, Chula Vista and Santiago joining Irvine.

One recent study from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies found that 49% of Santa Fe renters are cost-burdened, and 33% are severely cost-burdened. Still, young professionals are forced to look for rentals here due to housing shortages in surrounding areas.

In New York City, only 5.54% of rentals are affordable on the average graduate salary, with the fewest overall vacancies since the 1960s. It’s an issue that threatens the demographics of the city as a whole.

“The rental market in a city such as New York works by taking in young people looking to start their careers and spitting out older people, who end up buying homes, whether in New York City or elsewhere,” says Bloomberg’s Conor Sen. “When the buying-homes part of the equation is difficult it jams up the rental market and prevents young people from moving in or forces out those who can’t afford to stay.”

The U.S. cities where the average graduate salary can afford to rent the most space

Frisco in Texas offers the most floor space of any large city to the average graduate: some 1,509 sq. ft. on average. That’s around three times bigger than what you’d get in LA (495 sq. ft) or Boston (514 sq. ft.) Companies such as Keurig Dr Pepper, Addus Homecare, Careington International and HCA Healthcare Center for Clinical Advancement are big employers in Frisco.

Carmel, Indiana, offers the second-most space for the average graduate: 1291 sq. ft. The city recently launched the Carmel Housing Task Force, which consists of leaders, experts and citizens, to study and address pressing housing issues in the area. 

Despite the large spaces currently available to graduate professionals, the market may be tightening, with over-55s in the city increasingly opting for rentals over purchasing. “We haven’t produced enough housing to keep up with the job growth that we’ve had here, so that limits the supply, which of course drives the price up,” says Andrea Davis, Executive Director of local housing initiative HAND Inc.

The U.S. cities where the average graduate salary can afford to rent the least space

For those wishing to recreate the cramped student dorm experience, the local average graduate salary will get you the least square footage in Honolulu (395 sq. ft.), San Diego (447 sq. ft.) and Los Angeles (495 sq. ft.) Housing crises are a cyclical event in space-strapped Hawaii, with the arrival of U.S. Navy personnel in the 1930s, the war in the ‘40s and so on. Now, developers are looking at the vacant office space that remains after the pandemic to create more living space for Honolulu’s downtown professionals.

Boston offers the average graduate the fifth least living space in the country for their money – just 514 sq. ft. The city has the highest concentration of twentysomethings of any major U.S. city. However, a quarter of them plan to leave within the next five years, according to a recent survey, despite 89% of young residents being happy with their day-to-day life in the city.

As in Honolulu, developers are busy transforming some of the 20% of Boston’s disused office buildings into living spaces. However, this raises special challenges in a city where the buildings — and their windows — are so big. One solution is to ‘core’ buildings top to bottom like an apple, making potential homes more efficient and freeing ground weight to build higher.

Room to swing a cat

Choosing a city to work and live in involves many variables. But few things are more important in life than the place you call home. With studies showing that the average U.S. renter is now likely to be rent-burdened, it is essential to figure out the kind of budget you need left over from your rent to afford the lifestyle you desire. Your dream location to build a graduate career may be the one where you can find inspiring work, thrive out and about, stretch out at home and put the stress of apartment hunting behind you.

Methodology

This project explores what college graduates could realistically afford to rent in major cities across the United States, based on the logic from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that rent affordability is calculated at 30% of gross income.

To start, we pulled the median bachelor’s degree-level annual earnings for the 100 most populated cities across America from the U.S. Census. We then converted this to a monthly figure and calculated the 30% rent affordability value for each city.

Next, we scraped all rental listings available for each city on Zillow, retrieving the price and size in square feet for each. In all, data for 54,327 properties was collected.

This allowed us to calculate two metrics for each city: 

1. The % of rentals that could be afforded (based on the 30% value) for locals earning the median graduate salary.

2. The average size (square foot) of these affordable rentals in each city.

This data analysis was completed in March 2024.