2019 Update: Median Home Price And Salary Required In 25 Major Cities

The team at HSH.com features a periodic update entitled "The Salary You Must Earn to Buy a Home in the 50 Largest Metros". The key question is:

"How much salary do you need to earn in order to afford the principal and interest payments on a median-priced home in your metro area?"

The article is a must-read for anyone interested in US real estate trends and income demographics. Here is a slightly edited version of Keith's table of the key data. We've rounded the dollar amounts to the nearest $100 to facilitate reading. Note that the data is sorted by the salary needed to finance the median single-family priced home with a standard 28 percent "front-end" debt ratio and a 20 percent down payment. The locations are for the entire metro areas defined by the Office of Management and Budget. 

How do these metropolitan area real estate costs stack up against each other and the US median household income? Here is a column chart to which we've added the latest data for the US median household income as of 2018 (from our latest update here).

Here's the same table as above, sorted by the median home price change from the previous quarter:

We'll keep an eye on this series to see how these trends change over time. We highly recommend a look at the slide show from the HSH.com article (see the stack of vertical links) of the 25 cities with additional details and a city-by-city summary.