I don’t think this is very accurate. In my county the “living wage” is $26.50 for a single adult with no children.
Many young people I know live on much less than this.
This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable.
For example, transportation costs are $9000/year and housing is $20000/year. These are both way more than is necessary.
They need better branding because calling this a living wage is a misnomer and harming their cause.
> This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable.
This is a debatable goalpost. It seems more reasonable to me to assume that meeting basic shelter needs includes having a private room to oneself. The only reason to argue otherwise is to try to drive down the wage further, and is that at all necessary? Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago, and the only reason it seems out of reach for many now is because purchasing power has been slowly stagnating for decades, while housing costs have soared in recent times. Yet this whole time, GDP continues to rise. It seems that our society can easily support much higher minimum wages (and this would likely have only a positive effect of stimulating the economy), but simply chooses not to.
> Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago, and the only reason it seems out of reach for many now is because purchasing power has been slowly stagnating for decades
50 years ago, in high cost of living areas, you could rent an SRO, but now they're either banned or practically banned because they're strongly disincentivized against. Combine this with not building enough new housing and you get a recipe for rent increases. Even if a minimum wage works as intended, it can only subsidize demand, which would do nothing when the bottleneck is the supply.
If a person is working 40 hours a week to contribute to society, then they should be able to afford housing from that society. If a person on minimum wage needs to have a roommate to get by, then that means that their 40 hours a week is not enough to afford their own shelter. Without that roommate, the person goes without a home despite having done their time for society. This is not reasonable.
If it is reasonable for a young person to have flatmates, then that should be because they are a student or an artist and are working only part-time while devoting the rest of their time to their studies or their art.
But a person working full-time? Who may be a single mother or father with a child to support? They should be able to afford a place to live, without roommates.
I would only add that young people or anyone should be able to afford to live alone as you say OR opt to live with roommates to share expenses and save and build wealth. It shouldn't be necessary for anyone working 40 hours a week to pool their resources with other people in similar situations simply to survive.
A minimum wage should not necessarily afford you a median home, that's why it's called a minimum. But for a functional developed nation I argue it should afford you a private room or a very small apartment. Ideally the cost between the two wouldn't be that different, but due to decades of building restrictions the latter does not really exist. This isn't true in Japan for example, where you can find arbitrarily small apartments at correspondingly low prices.
A living wage is for living indefinitely, not just surviving. That should afford more comforts like a reasonable amount of space, a car if needed, and saving for retirement or emergencies.
Is it reasonable for two people who are dating to have to keep their shared apartment when they break up? What should happen if a roommate becomes flaky or moves out?
These are all real situations that make me think that pinning "living wage" to a level where you have to have roommates is not a good goal. You're basically asking people to survive by accepting unstable living conditions and potentially taking strangers into their homes, which isn't exactly "having your needs met."
Its reasonable, but as we've advanced humanity in so many other fields (medical, technical, agricultural) why shouldn't the base standard of living also be increasing.
The base standard of living has increased throughout pretty much all of humanity over the past 50 years, and through huge parts of humanity over even 20 years.
Theres also lots more people, and as more people consume more resources it does not follow that better technology in some field will translate to increased every aspect of life.
I agree with the sentiment, but the premise of capitalism is that those advances also become cheaper due to market efficiencies. In other words, people should be able to have a higher quality of life for relatively lower cost. If/where that actually occurs is a whole different discussion.
A living wage shouldn't be based upon what wages a student could be comfortably living on for a couple years before they get their $500k/yr new grad quant job. It should be based upon what people could live on comfortably indefinitely.
It's not "student wage". It's not "struggling young person" wage. It's "living" wage. It's for living - at any age.
Does this then imply some jobs are not intended to supply a living wage?
Eg does that quants internship get a lower pay because they are expected to graduate beyond it? If so, how do we define what jobs are stepping stones and which are long-term careers?
I think all full time jobs should at a minimum pay a true living wage where one can live comfortably, save for emergencies, etc. If the job cannot pay that then it shouldn't exist.
There are many ways to accomplish this beyond simply raising wages. Better government programs, lower the cost of housing/medical/transportation/food/etc. (these are surprisingly simple but many vested interests don't want this to happen), better retirement programs, etc. etc. etc. You see more of this in more socially democratic countries.
I’m not against that idea but there are some knock-on effects we should be careful of. For example, it will make it hard for younger people to get a job. If I have to pay a teenager the same as someone with a decade or more of work experience, that teenager probably won’t get a job.
With a lot of these discussions, we need to be careful about the seductively simple solutions.
The issue of "which jobs should exist" should be left to the market only. If typical low-end jobs throughout the country pay wages that do not guarantee a minimum living income, the government should simply make up the difference for everyone in a fair way (subject to clawback rates as earned income increases, in order to keep the overall arrangement viable).
(Lowering the cost of essential goods and services is also something that can be done by leveraging the open market. It doesn't take yet another wasteful government program, which is the typical approach in socialist and social-democrat countries.)
Any adult with a full-time job should be able to afford a studio or small apartment. Probably making concessions on the location depending on where they want to live. It's not a matter of being young or not
In the US, this is trivial to do. Theres plenty of states where unskilled entry lever wages easily allows this life, for most of the locations, with the exception of extremely high cost city centers.
Pick IL for example. Min wage $15, so $30k a year income fulltime. Most every adult that’s worked even a little should be able to earn decently more than min, which is for completely unskilled, new workers. Median il wage is 66k.
Even at $30k, the rough 30% rule on housing is $750/mo. At 66k it’s over $1500/mo.
Dig through smaller cities, and you’ll find apartments to rent in either end of this range. This works in any state.
Part of the issue is those smaller cities don’t offer a large supply of job opportunities. So people are often not able to pick and choose their location.
This is an underappreciated argument for basic income/UBI: you need a lot less of it since its very existence enables recipients to move to lower cost of living locations.
(Which in turn opens up opportunities for others to move in to the higher-cost places and boost their own productivity.)
Historically it's reasonable for anybody to have roommates. It's a modern scenario where having your own place is supposed to be the standard.
Historically housing was much smaller. And people lived with their families for a lot longer commonly. A lot less was also spent on domestic appliances (not just washer & dryers) and at-home entertainment (a lot less was spent on entertainment in general).
> Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago
I think others pointed this out but I don't think you can find any data to prove this because its not true.
I'm not a historian but I have seen a number of old movies and in those movies it was very common for the characters to be some poor schlub with a full time job at the factory living in some sort of group home/flophouse situation. Movies tend to reflect stories that resonate with the public at the time so I suspect that is because this was a common situation. I'd much prefer a single roommate in an apartment to a flophouse.
> It seems more reasonable to me to assume that meeting basic shelter needs includes having a private room to oneself
Why would that be reasonable? College students and young adults usually have roommates. I don't feel it's inhumane.
> The only reason to argue otherwise is to try to drive down the wage further
Another reason to argue otherwise is because you care about the truth. Even if you and I agree on the ends, if you use the means of exaggerating or stretching the truth to get there, you are never on my side. Saying that you need to not have roommates to live is an exaggeration.
> Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago
You will never find any data to support that because it isn't true. 50 years ago, flophouses were common. You would share a bedroom room with others, with shared kitchen and bathroom between multiple bedrooms. In college, I lived in a housing-coop network where we slept two to a room. 50 years ago, they slept 4 or 6 to a room in my exact house.
> and the only reason it seems out of reach for many now is because purchasing power has been slowly stagnating for decades, while housing costs have soared in recent times
This is true. But there is a very natural reason why. Look at nearly any US city, and see how many more jobs there are in that city than there were 50 years ago. Then look at how many more homes there are in that city than there were 50 years ago. You will see that the number of new jobs far exceeds the number of new homes. The result is that wealthier people bid up the housing, while poor people are forced to live outside the city and commute. So why have no new houses been built? It can't be helped by the fact that building new homes is illegal. (e.g. buildings with 3 or more apartments are illegal in 70% of san francisco.)
Please direct your anger in the right direction! It's not generally the case that billionaires own thousands of homes, hoarding them while the poor live on the street. It's more often the case that the population has increased while the number of homes in places people want to live has stayed the same. The *only* solution is to increase the number of homes in places people want to live. Raising the minimum wage, taxing the rich, fighting corporations, adding rent control laws, none of that will help solve the root of the problem, the growth rate of homes in cities is far slower than the rate of people wanting to live there!
Hard disagree on this. $26.50 sounds like a nightmare 10 years ago, let alone now. There's a lot of places in the US where having a car is essentially mandatory (actually, most places). If you can't afford a car, that limits where you can live to mostly urban areas, which then pushes the housing cost up.. and by the way, housing costs are always going up, and no, you won't be able to invest in a home, you've been priced out by developers and speculators.
Not to mention you need to be able to save money for unemployment and rainy days..
I think you're ignoring how much poor people rely on each other and relatives to get by. That's our societies "safety net". That doesn't mean they're "thriving" or even comfortable, nor is it even sustainable (what happens when mom/pop die or require assistance and can't help their kids anymore?).
9000/yr for a car alone isn't crazy at all, just look at average car prices. I just had to do my vehicle renewal today and it was $500 for a 5 year old car that's not particularly expensive! If I look at insurance and car payments, I easily spend over 700 a month. This is on a 30k car, so it's not like I went and bought the biggest luxury vehicle possible.
The average total cost of car ownership in the US in 2025 was about $12,000. $9,000 is already a huge underestimate of what the average person is paying.
I lived in a blizzard ridden area using just a 250cc motorcycle, year round, including riding it on the interstate. Layer enough layers, use heated gloves, etc you can easily get by with just a ninja 250, you're not going to burn more than $3-4k a year on that no matter hard you try.
You don't actually need a car unless you have a child or a tradesmen with tools or something like that, a small displacement motorcycle will still take you to 99.9% of the jobs in the lower 48.
Based on the data sources and the methodology, it looks about as accurate as you could get. They link to their methodology and technical documentation from that site. Even if some resourceful young people you know can get by on less, in general people should not have to live in abject poverty while working a full time job -- I would consider that to be a "Dying Wage".
Ultimately in all these calculators there has to be a threshold that determines whether something is needed for “living” or not. And that varies highly by the individual.
The calculator suggests $5,021 for food, but for me I’d only shop at high-end grocery like Whole Foods and buy organics whenever possible. That’s clearly not enough. On the other hand it suggests $1,792 for internet and mobile which is about double what I actually pay and I have both unlimited mobile data and unlimited home data. Then it claims medical costs of $2,890. For a fit individual with good employer-provided health insurance, that figure should be almost zero.
Ultimately the amount one spends for living depends very much on one’s preferences and these calculators are approximates. I believe you when you say many young people can live for much less, but that doesn’t invalidate the calculator.
> Then it claims medical costs of $2,890. For a fit individual with good employer-provided health insurance, that figure should be almost zero.
No, it won't be almost zero because they're including health insurance premiums in that figure. Few jobs in the US cover 100% of the premiums for their employees.
>> The cost of health care is composed of two subcategories: (1) premiums associated with employer-sponsored health insurance plans and (2) out-of-pocket expenses for medical services, drugs, and medical supplies.
Food choices are highly personal. It’s probably the single most variable expense item here. Who are you decide for someone else whether their food is reasonable enough or not.
Well I’m not the one to decide. That’s why we let individuals allocate money for themselves so they can prioritize what they care about from their resource pool.
Because preferences for food, housing, and healthcare are essentially unbounded, I think you will always have unmet preferences.
When the choice is between organic food (expensive) and eating pesticides that are meant to kill and neuter living organisms (somewhat economical) it's a choice we never should have allowed to even exist in the first place.
> For example, transportation costs are $9000/year and housing is $20000/year. These are both way more than is necessary.
Even on the smaller things. "Internet & Mobile" for where I am jumped out to me. Based on the difference between 1 adult and 2 adults, it's $582 per person-year for mobile (which I guess isn't far off if you get a good new phone every 2 years, it's reasonable enough) and with that subtracted, internet is $100 per month. The methodology page says "County-level data on the cost of internet comes from research on lowest-cost monthly plans from BroadbandNow", but even that page shows much cheaper options available (including the $70 per month Google Fiber I have).
This depends a lot on where you live. In our area, the minimum internet-only offering from Spectrum is $125 (approximately) after taxes/fees, and the only "competitor" is AT&T, which is more expensive for (at least in our area) worse / flakier service.
I was surprised (at least for Birmingham/AL/Jefferson County) how accurately it pegged _most_ of the costs -- childcare here is closer to $12k/annum/child so that one was the only one I pegged as 'off' - they show 2 children as $16k and that's a ~$8k underestimate
yeah, I spend $30/month on internet (the 100 Mbps Google Fiber, since I realized I didn't really need 1 Gbps at home now that I go into the office every day...)
I am but a single datapoint, but the $100/month for home internet hits quite close to home. I currently pay $130 for Spectrum's gigabit cable internet plan. Their website offers it for $70, but that's only for the first year; they have raised that price by, apparently, $20 per year I've been a customer. We do not have fiber and my only other ISP option is a DSL provider that maxes out at 40mbps for $30. So sure, I can save about 75% on my internet bill by opting for internet that is 4% of the speed that I currently pay for. And this is in a rapidly growing suburb. I think $100/month is easily the case for places like my home, where local broadband monopolies still exist mostly unchallenged.
I have found if you scroll all the way to the right, you get the living wage with multiple roommates and bumming a ride to work or waiting for the bus. My area most of the full-time entry level fast food/Walmart/gas station jobs pay about a dollar less than that number.
"Living wage" means what a household needs for a dignified life, not just for bare subsistence.
If you need roommates because you can't afford an apartment on your own, you are poor by definition. That's probably the most universal definition of poverty that has ever existed. As long as there have been houses, the baseline household has had a housing unit of their own. Households that have to share housing with others have always been characterized as unusually poor, no matter the continent and the millennium.
> Households that have to share housing with others have always been characterized as unusually poor, no matter the continent and the millennium.
Historically speaking this is incredibly wrong.
Nearly every culture evolved from some sort of shared communal longhouse to individual clan homes, to extended family homes. The idea of individual private rooms actually comes about explicitly from Manors in the late medieval ages. We really didn't see widespread individual homes until the industrial revolution. In places like the East, individual rooms were an import from the West.
Even in rare places where there were individual family homes (Ancient Egypt, for one). Privacy and individuality were just not concepts. Through the 1800s, you might have literally been sharing a bed with a stranger in a hotel.
There has also never, ever been a point in human history where living without some sort of roommate was common. Even in situations where you had lots of single workers, they almost always lived in bunkhouses or SROs.
They probably are overshooting, I agree. But then again the "living wage" for a healthy person is a lot less than for a not-quite healthy person or a sick person.
Are those people funding their retirement? Are they going to be able to take care of themselves as health issues come up? Are they receiving support from family?
Edit: also the housing cost is probably factoring in a studio or maybe a 1bd for a single person. That may seem luxurious to you, but for many that is the only real option they have (roommates are hard to come by and can hurt you physically and fiscally).
> This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.”
An appartment and a car aren't exactly luxury goods. Cars are often needed to work, and well, having a roof over your head is usually required for a decent living.
Sure, if you fancy living in a cardboard box located next to your work, your living standards are going to be much easier to attain.
I do think it's a crack up how when I check my own "living wage" i still under-perform in comparison to the chart, but in my county i'm within the top 15%.
Needless to say; only old people have homes and only those who have sufficient help get a nice appt.
Why should we accept that rather than our own standards? If we take your tack on this then we shouldn't try to make anything better for anyone, just live with what we've got and accept whatever lot we find ourselves in.
Is a living wage there bare minimum to live or enough to live a life?
I don’t make a living wage for my region and while I can afford food and a room to rent, I can’t really live a decent life, save for the future or invest in myself, I just barely get by every paycheque to paycheque. Thanks
> Is a living wage there bare minimum to live or enough to live a life?
More the former. A lot of the commenters here are missing that detail. A living wage doesn't mean you can afford all the nice things, it means you aren't starving and can cover the needs for you and your family, but maybe not many wants.
They do not actually live on less, they sacrifice their health or well-being in order to meet the constraint.
I would argue the calculator grossly underestimates necessities because most of these jobs are not doable in old age, so you need to account for saving $1 for each $1 you make, to support yourself while old. You also need an emergency fund, because in the US you get billed $1000 for the most random shit at the most random time.
I got billed $5000 randomly for an echodardiogram because insurance didn't pay for it despite them saying they would. At least I have $5K to spare, but considering that can happen, that needs to be considered a basic necessity.
I feel like I’ve eat pretty well, and my household food costs are almost half what the calculator shows. Similar for vehicle costs etc.
After looking at the method, I think the calculator probably has some bias towards “what society has convinced us we need”. To a certain extent that is a relative and subjective perception problem, and one exacerbated when you live in a society with a lot of consumer debt.
The yearly cost of food for one person without children in the county of Los Angeles(I selected an expensive area on purpose) is showing 4,428 USD. That's about 12 dollars a day. I don't even live in the United States but that value looks pretty low if anything.
Anecdotally, I can easily eat for $12/day even in Seattle. There are days when I probably spend half of that. We aren't talking beans and rice here, these are diverse satisfying meals. It does require you to cook though.
What does eating pretty well mean to you? Maybe you don't even if you think you do? We don't know without your budget or a receipt from your typical grocery run
Mostly what the typical nutritional guidance has advocated consistently over the last few decades, with maybe slightly higher protein intake.
6-8 servings of fruits and vegetables a day, fairly liberal amounts of dairy and lean protein, lesser amounts of red meat. Grains like breads/rice for additional carbohydrates.
Admittedly, avoiding eating out regularly is the #1 way I keep food costs down, though.
That’s what I think when I hear the term, too. But these numbers are not just living, but living at a pretty high standard.
I would expect living wage to mean the amount one needs to be able to live out your life fairly decently and with dignity. I think many do so without having pay this high.
Is a family of 4 in a 2BR considered living wage? Because they have rent at $3600 for a family in silicon valley... which seems impossible. I paid more than that when I graduated from college with a roommate 20 years ago.
The older I get the more I realize how fraught the idea of a "living wage" is.
Through mid life, your financial health is not as determined by wages, but by your family/connections. Do you have access to a grandmother who can babysit? A decent second-hand car? A good roommate situation? Just look at the expense table - any one of these things could be worth up to 20% of your income!
And you see that literally right here - are any of us actually comfortable with the idea that the value of your labor should be determined by your marriage status and number of children?
It's kind of telling that countries with "successful" minimum wages either don't have one and just institutionalize collective bargaining, or they do some fancy calculations that start with prevailing median wages and welfare eligibility. The idea of trying to get this number from the bottom up by building expenses just doesn't seem very robust.
It needs to be because the US has leaned further into individualism relative to other countries. If society's golden metric of success means being able to acquire all of these luxuries or services purely through monetary means as transactional individuals, don't be too surprised when the expenses rack up.
I think it also reflects a lense of US academia. It kind of assumes a sanitized, formal, self-sufficient life, detached from others - and then assumes anything other than that is an aberration.
It's kind of like the physics joke about assuming a spherical cow in a vacuum.
Just because the wider society encourages it, your family doesn't have to lean into individualism, and many don't. We got by when I was a kid with a lot of help from friends and family, when I am absolutely sure we didn't have a living wage under this definition.
Did you fairly compensate your friends and family members for that "help"? Systematic reliance on wholly unpaid labor is not exactly something to be proud of.
Um, sometimes people help each other because they want to, or because they understand that those less fortunate than them need it, or because they understand that they may need help someday and so it doesn't make sense to make a big deal of "compensation" now. It's called community, and I think it is something to be proud of.
For reference, that's 10:15 per day, 365 days a year.
Or 996 without vacations, if you intend to have one day off.
996 has never been a standard work duration for urban workers in China, aside from some tech companies that promoted performative work ethics. And even there, people do take vacations.
Office workers will eat lunch, take a 1-2hr nap in the afternoon, and also eat dinner with their coworkers within the common 9-9-6 rhythm. It still takes a significant chunk of time, but the actual working time butt-in-chair is closer to 54 hours
I think they just do that to get to an hourly rate. It’s probably better to look at the annual income and think of that number regardless of how many hours you worked during the year.
I don't get what the big deal is about mandatory paid vacation. My view is that your total compensation will be set based on the market value of your labor. Some portion of that compensation is given to you in the form of ordinary wages and some portion in the form of paid vacations. If the government mandated paid vacations would it increase many people's total compensation?
In my European mind (I have 25 mandated days off per year), if there was not a mandatory paid vacation limit two things would happen:
1. Further exploit desperate people since those that don't need to work at any cost would steer clear of jobs that have 0 holidays.
2. You would further penalize people with families where both parents work. It is well understood that if your kid is sick you can't really use your sick days and so must use your PTO days. Having 0 available days doesn't play well with having kids (personal experience).
And finally, having mandated PTO allow you to actually take holidays. I heard too many times of companies that offer unlimited PTO and when the employer tries to take some they sabotage him/her or plainly threaten his/her job security.
The easiest answer is yes, since many Americans currently earn minimum wage with no paid vacation, minimum wage with mandatory vacation would be an increase in total compensation. I don't know how paid leave regulations impact wage growth in general, I'm sure there is research on this but I didn't immediately find anything.
Another way to think about it: why do we have building codes? We don't want to incentivize builders to cut corners that would risk an electrical fire or falling down in an earthquake or something in order to offer a cheaper price, so we make it illegal. If unsafe buildings are allowed, it makes it difficult for safe builders to stay in the market. Similarly, we don't want to incentivize workers to sell their labor with zero leave in order to offer a cheaper price, because that risks unhealthy and insular communities (literally unhealthy if people can't take sick leave), poor mental health, unhealthy childcare practices, an unhealthy civic environment if people can't take time off to vote or volunteer, etc. The labor market is competitive and people will sacrifice paid leave if they have to, because they need money to live, so we should make it illegal to remove the incentive.
Wages and time off are not frictionlessly interchangeable in the vast majority of jobs. Mandating minimum levels for both helps make sure people have access to both.
> total compensation will be set based on the market value of your labor.
No, you do not want that.
The market value of most people's labour is very close to zero.
Left to the market most of the population would live just below starvation, a very small group of owners would live very well, and a small group of artisans would do OK supporting the tiny group.
For a lot of us, work is not our life. Turns out that most people really want a paid vacation. Smart Capitalists know that it's easier to extract value from workers with higher morale.
If you would rather trade your paid vacation for an extra week of pay, I am sure you and your boss can work it out. Companies pay out unused vacation all the time. Just don't ruin it for the rest of us!
Unless you have a union, there's a dramatic power imbalance between you (the employee) and the employer at the negotiating table. I'd urge you to read up about the 19th century labor movement and what conditions prompted it.
Mandatory vacation, like education, mandatory IDs, and myriad other laws are the sole jurisdiction of the individual States to decide. There will never be a "US" law about these things. Most questions that start with "why is the US the only country..." can be explained by the fact that the States decide and the US government can't force the States to make laws.
Similarly, there is no US law against most crimes. It doesn't mean those laws don't exist in every State.
That said, there is no State with mandatory paid vacation either AFAIK.
Given the political diversity of the States, this suggests that mandatory paid vacation is either not considered an important issue by people across the political spectrum or there are existing regulations that would create real problems if there paid vacation was mandated without changing those regulations first.
There has been a federal law for mandatory family and medical leave for 30+ years (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fmla). It is unpaid and doesn't cover all workers, but that's a legislative detail that could be changed. I don't see any legal or constitutional reason that unpaid leave can be federal but paid leave can't.
Yes, and your government takes 57% of the total GDP to themselves, rely on an external power (that’s less and less friendly) for their protection and are on the track to their 6th prime minister in less than 2 years (is it 6th? I’ve lost track) because if they try to increase the retirement age above 62 (in their pay as you go unmaintanable system) people come down to the streets to burn down businesses and destroy public property.
Spain and Portugal were in pretty much the same boat not too long ago and they've started to reform of their own accord. The French will come around once the bond vigilantes start taking a serious look at that whole government deficit+debt situation and unsustainable retirement ages. Of course it will be painful and involve severe austerity measures, but that's what it takes.
I’m not sure that’s the key factor. Resource wealth helps, but it doesn’t automatically translate into shorter workweeks or generous leave. Countries with far fewer natural resources—such as Germany, the Netherlands, or Denmark—still manage shorter working hours, strong labor protections, and substantial paid vacation.
Those outcomes depend much more on labor policy, bargaining power, and what governments choose to protect. In many places, business pressure and media framing make long hours seem unavoidable, even though they’re ultimately the result of policy choices.
The cost of childcare seems way underestimated, at least for young children.
It shows $13,641 for my metro (Chicago), but day care costs are easily twice that. Obviously once kids are school-age this is much lower (if going to public school), so maybe that's how you get at this figure.
On the other hand the transportation costs are way overestimated for non-car families (we spend less than $2k/year on local transit for 2 adults and 1 child, obviously this doesn't include airfare for vacations or whatnot). Maybe these are both an artifact of too broad a catchment area (childcare is probably cheaper in the 'burbs, but so likely are average transportation costs).
Someone is siphoning your value. It's quite obvious when you track the productivity, or ask questions about how did your great-grandpa survive at all without machines. Just stating the obvious, don't mind me.
>They lived in a house or apt with a third the sqft/person that was far more likely to catch fire and didn't have AC.
But at least they could afford a house, right? I think a lot of people would accept living in a house without AC and more likely to catch fire. Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well.
>If they had a car they most likely shared it. It was far less safe, didn't have AC, guzzled gas and polluted.
Car technology in the past was worse, we know that. Cars were more affordable though.
>Never ate out and spent a third of earnings on cheap grocery store staples.
Like today then.
>We're benefiting greatly from the increase in productivity. We just view our great-grandfather luxuries as our necessities.
Young people are rotting at home unable to go ahead with their lives because wages nowadays are not enough to pay for a house and a family. Why do people try to deny this obvious reality? Productivity didn't benefit everyone equally and people in the past had more opportunities to build a life inside a standard that was socially acceptable.
>Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well.
I assume by catch fire GP means electrical wiring? Many houses on market today are literally not remodeled since the 1940s so retain that original wiring.
All you've done here is take the tired dishonest "kids these days and their darn avocado toast and smartphones" trope and used different goods/services to spin it in a way to appeal to the median commentor on HN.
You're ignoring the gorilla in the room. Why can't one live in a comparable manner today and bank the difference? Because those things aren't available? Why aren't those things available?
> You're ignoring the gorilla in the room. Why can't one live in a comparable manner today and bank the difference?
For two reasons.
1. They're illegal. You're not allowed to build a house to 1936 climate, safety, and fire codes with un-licensed labor. And boarding houses were effectively banned.
2. Market. Most people would rather live in a smaller apartment than 1936 style un-climate controlled death trap.
And the reasons are the same for cars. You legally can't see a new version of a 1936 car, and even if you could most people would rather drive an old civic.
> Why can't one live in a comparable manner today and bank the difference?
You can do this. Just move to a sparsely populated area and work remote. Rural and semi-rural areas are basically the "poor", lower productivity areas within any given country, if you can arbitrage the incomes difference via remote work you stand to gain quite a bit.
Yeah I think people need to start asking the question, "Where is the money going". Its not just inexistent, its literally going somewhere other than your pocket.
They're not voting against their own self interest; they just have different interests than you. Their primary interest and goal is making sure their out-group is hurting, and that is what they are voting for, regardless of that happens to them.
It's rent seeking, the antithesis of capitalism. It's always been. Enabled by abuse of government power. And no, it's not a partisan issue.
You see this pattern across the American economy. The boomers locked in their house values by passing all the zoning regulations to artificially restrict the supply of housing. AMA artificially restricts the supply of doctors to increase their wages. Accreditation pushed ever higher costs on universities which increased costs, and the availability of loans basically cut off the brake cable. And who do you think is really benefitting from all the companies enshittifying everything and pushing up costs? The billionaires and retirees of course. And the young/working people are paying for it.
The solution for individuals is arbitrage. Remote work, get healthcare abroad, and avoid college tuitions. The fact that these things make sense at all shows how broken the markets are.
And that someone is mostly government, which is a growing and increasingly wasteful fraction of GDP. We really need to start reining in the national debt and government spending. Drain the swamp.
No, it's rentiers. The government takes about a quarter but the rentiers easily take 2 times as much in interest, monthly fees, and other costs that I have to pay in perpetuity. You just don't consider that because you think those people are necessary for living a good life. In reality their purpose is to extract as much money from you for as little work as possible.
As long as collusion exists, I don't see this changing. Manhattan is more expensive than it was a 100 years ago but less people actually live there now. Not a little less either - 700,000 people less. We've built way more housing at the same time. And yes, people have more square footage per person now but the housing doubled and the population went down dramatically.
Rent is always going to go up there even if they build more. Same in other places. As long as rent setting tools exist to collude - we will see the rent not go down. You're not gonna dump $100m in new buildings and not maximize your return.
Reminder that the Republicans' policy has been to starve the beast. That is push up government costs while passing huge tax cuts (like the big beautiful bill Republicans just passed that is greatly increasing the debt) in order to sabotage government's ability to function, then blast from every rooftop that we need to cut government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
"The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism."
This has been posted many times before, and AFAICT it’s fundamentally misleading, as it doesn’t account for transfer payments (refundable tax credits, food stamps, housing vouchers, ACA subsidies, …)
That artificially inflates the “wage level” needed for the estimated living standard. It also makes the tax figures absurd. No two-parent, two-kid household making $110K is paying 15% of that net in taxes, subtracting deductions, credits and subsidies.
IOW, our “safety net” for middle-income parents could get 5X more generous and this calculator would show the same results.
A lot of the safety net also goes poof if you have the living wage. So I'm not sure exactly how your argument works. Are you saying the minimum wage should be under the poverty wage and everyone with that wage should depend on safety nets as it is now?
How are they getting medical costs in San Mateo County so wrong.
$11,896 with 2 children? My Kaiser $14K deductible bronze plan costs $2100 a month. That's more like $25K a year, and that's before I use it... the only reason I have it is in case something traumatic happens. This is the cheapest plan I can get on covered california.
I assume that's not an employer sponsored plan? You can read the methodology for more, but their data is a mix of a) how much people pay into employer-sponsored health insurance plans, b) individual and small group insurance market information, where available, and c) estimated out-of-pocket expenses not covered by insurance. If you're buying a plan through a marketplace, you are almost certainly going to come in well above the median for your area.
Puerto Rico is always left out of these analyses. AFAIK we are included in the same data sources (like dol.gov), so I'm always disappointing to see the exclusion.
I fell out of love with the living wage when the UK government bumped minimum wage and called it living wage. The government kept on getting raked over the coals by charities who claimed that people working minimum wage were in poverty and so our govenrment bumped the minimum wage by a bit and then announced it as "This is the new NATIONAL LIVING WAGE". Which is just perfect politics. You're the government, so you can just take a term. Trump can brand the Gulf of America, and the UK Tories can just redefine the living wage. Now those charities are stuffed because any time they talk about a living wage everyone gets confused, it cuts the legs out of the conversation.
The core of the problem is that you basically have to have someone define what is an acceptable standard of living. Sharing a flat? Nah, the MIT trained economist thinks that's for the poverty people so that is defined as below living wage. Walk to work? No. You need atleast $10k a year on travel otherwise you're a bus wanker.
A huge amount of this is value judgements on what is an acceptable standard of living from people who benefit from immense privilege but will never experience the thing they're studying.
Anecdotally, I found some of the costs like food and food to be inflated.
When I looked at the methodology, some is based on consumer surveys so it may be more reflective of over-consumption. In other words, it prices in what people want or what they’re used to, not what they need. The counterpoint is that maybe some wealthy countries should be pricing in a higher quality of life, but the “living wage” then becomes a bit of a misnomer.
Anecdotally their numbers are significantly higher for my city than what I actually spend in some categories. I am not frugal by any stretch of the imagination, you would have to be pretty careless and/or irresponsible to hit some of those numbers. On the other hand, the living wage is below the actual minimum wage in some cases.
If you look at US BLS and Federal Reserve studies on such things, they make a distinctions between what people actually spend on ordinary expenses and when people can no longer afford those categories of expenses.
An interesting artifact is that incomes across the 15-40th percentile range in the same city don't save much money but still have enough money to pay for all ordinary expenses. That is a wide range of incomes for people nominally spending their entire income on the same things. What actually seems to happen is that average people spend excess income on upgrading their lifestyle until they hit the 40th percentile, at which point the average person starts saving some of their additional excess income.
If you enter in a US city, another takeaway from the rendered table is that U.S. living standards (measured economically) continued to improve for some time after the 1970s despite weak wage growth largely because *more households relied on two earners instead of one*. While productivity kept rising, the gains were increasingly captured at the top and not shared with the workers. Of course that buffer is now long gone, but wages haven't kept up.
Can anyone speak to the reliability of using metropolitan statistical areas for something like this? Having lived across on both sides of the tracks in a few, grouping them for something like this seems like an interesting choice. One that I probably wouldn't agree with, but I'm out of my depth
The problem with defining “living wage” is you must trust that the person defining it has your best interests in mind, and is calculating it while including _your_ needs.
For example, you don’t want me to be the one to define “living wage.” I’ve been a prepper/bushcrafter for 20 years… the ACTUAL “living wage” is _zero_. There are innumerable resources all around you if you know how to find and use them.
And for my area it is very high. I live in a cheap midwest town and according to this, the difference between here and San Francisco is only 30k a year.
Yes, this is supposed to be the number at which you aren't going to go into (medical, auto) debt, make rent/utilities each month, and not starve. It is by no means intended to represent a life containing any luxuries.
There is something wrong with the transportation cost. I live in a poor rural county, and it says the 0-child transportation cost is $10k+. People's trucks here don't even cost that much, and they don't drive far. I see it counts as 2 working adults, but it's still grossly inflated.
I questioned that too, but vehicle costs are based off surveyed data. So if the average 2 adults have a car payment, insurance, fuel, and repair costs, it’s probably reflected in their data. To me, that’s different than saying “a reasonable mode of reliable transportation”
I don't think it's appropriate to use the average vehicle costs for the living wage. It overestimates how much people on that wage spend on their vehicles.
For example, the average new-vehicle price in December 2025 was about $50,000. But people earning the living wage mostly aren't buying that kind of car. They could buy a new car for less than half that, or buy a used car. Or they may choose to take public transit.
Housing data is flawed. Even if you’re single, no kids, you’re limited to what is available and 1 bedrooms in my state can’t be had for less than $1500/mo anywhere in the state. Yet this says housing costs annually would be $12000. How? I think the data this is based off of is super stale.
> Yet this says housing costs annually would be $12000. How?
Having roommates is extremely common.
There are also a lot of room-for-rent situations that don’t show up on the websites listing apartments. If you’re tapped into local networks of younger people there’s always someone with a room for rent or a group of friends looking for someone to take over a room in a house they’re renting together. Not helpful for someone in their 50s moving to a new city, but for young people living on a budget this is just how it works and has for a long time.
Read the second half of my comments: You're not going to find these roommate situations on public websites. The publicly listed ones are intentionally high.
For Phoenix[0] it shows $44 for 1 adult 1 child, but $42 for 2 adults 1 child with 1 adult working. Is this because of a child tax credit or something?
No, it's because their model puts dollar values on the labor contributed by non-working adults w/r/t raising children. So in that case, it could be that 1adult1child is slightly higher because of the need to pay for childcare, while the food/insurance/clothing etc of the additional adult in 2adult1child is offset by the fact that the non-working adult will conduct childcare and thus that expense goes away.
But then why is the number higher for 2adult1child (1 working) when compared to 2adult1child(both working). wouldn't child raising costs get added back in once both are working?
By my estimations, it's not a great calculator. $2.5k/month for all housing costs. I'm not saying it's not possible to find a studio + utilities but that's not a fun place to live. No AC, no insulation, built for a different climate which was 70 years ago, laundromat or (hopefully) coin-op laundry in building, likely near busy roads (101, el camino) or train tracks with no sound insulation, still extremely car dependent (which is included in this calculator - gas/electricity, taxes, and cars in CA are very expensive), etc. Again, doable but competitive market and not a fun one. You'd be guaranteed to NEVER own any property at that income. Until we have some public housing utopia, I'd say ownership should be accounted for in a living wage. Otherwise, you're gonna get evicted when retirement hits.
This calculator does not include retirement savings, emergency saving, etc. It just assumes you'll comfortably live paycheck to paycheck until you die and never save a dime. In our country, you will not be getting $60k/yr post tax from social security. So, this is a stupid calculator unless you plan to never retire or never experience job loss (max payout is $450/week for unemployment in CA), etc.
> This calculator does not include retirement savings, emergency saving, etc. It just assumes you'll comfortably live paycheck to paycheck until you die and never save a dime. In our country, you will not be getting $60k/yr post tax from social security. So, this is a stupid calculator unless you plan to never retire or never experience job loss (max payout is $450/week for unemployment in CA), etc.
It doesn't include those things because those aren't the things that are covered by a "living wage". Living wage sounds like something good, but it's literally just enough to cover what's needed. Can you afford housing, childcare, medical care, transportation for work, etc. It's a low bar, not a good target, for a society to try to hit. It means people at that wage shouldn't be going hungry or without shelter, but they won't necessarily be thriving.
Right, and I think we shouldn't even be talking about a fake ass "living" wage when it's so disconnected from what you actually need to reliably "live" in these environments. I don't know who comes up with these terms but it's terrible. It may as well be called, "absolute minimum amount of money to get by without anything ever bad happening or planning for the future at all" wage.
This is very cool to see all compiled and easily navigable.
The thing I want to see next would be the sister calculator: what it would take for a business of X size employees, Y revenue, Z other expenses, to increase wages to these standards.
This feels like it would help to close that gap. Give a business owner a concrete path to take. Just saying something is broken isn't going to get it fixed.
Just typing all this I think I have my weekend project lined up.
Pretty good, but not granular enough. For example, the area I grew up in is much cheaper to live in that the metro it is tagged to. The two areas are separated by 15 miles (~24km).
Does this base itself on the metric started in 1963, that was eseentially a big guess that 3x starvation level was well off? because we have better numbers now. Avg us salary is 60k, but to take car of the needs of a family of 4, not in starvation range is ~$160k/year
That highly depends on your definition of "need" and where you live. If you're in a city with ludicrous cost of living, like San Fransisco, then sure. But, that's also why people commute, or just choose to go somewhere cheaper. It's somewhat shocking seeing how much higher the standard of living is, with much less income, outside the big cities.
Put in an area and see for yourself. In general, yes this calculator is closer to what you're describing. For example, Skamania County, a pretty rural county of Washington state with a very low population of 12,000 people, still has a "required living wage" for 1 breadwinner + 1 homemaker + 3 children of $104,292 per year: https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/53059
Yeah Dallas county Texas, where I live, for family of 4 and 2 working adults is around $105k/year. That seems close, there’s nothing secure about that long term (no room for savings or retirement) but it’s livable.
How is 1 adult + 3 children at $107.95 and 2 adults + 3 children at $63.97
5 people could require more money than 4. You could say in the 2nd case it's $63.97x2 but that doesn't make any sense either because the table also has 1 adult 0 children $29.31 and 2 adults 0 children at $41.81. Clearly they are not doing 2x to that $41.81 as it would be more than the $29.31 at 2x
I don’t think this is very accurate. In my county the “living wage” is $26.50 for a single adult with no children.
Many young people I know live on much less than this.
This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable.
For example, transportation costs are $9000/year and housing is $20000/year. These are both way more than is necessary.
They need better branding because calling this a living wage is a misnomer and harming their cause.
> This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable.
This is a debatable goalpost. It seems more reasonable to me to assume that meeting basic shelter needs includes having a private room to oneself. The only reason to argue otherwise is to try to drive down the wage further, and is that at all necessary? Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago, and the only reason it seems out of reach for many now is because purchasing power has been slowly stagnating for decades, while housing costs have soared in recent times. Yet this whole time, GDP continues to rise. It seems that our society can easily support much higher minimum wages (and this would likely have only a positive effect of stimulating the economy), but simply chooses not to.
> Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago, and the only reason it seems out of reach for many now is because purchasing power has been slowly stagnating for decades
50 years ago, in high cost of living areas, you could rent an SRO, but now they're either banned or practically banned because they're strongly disincentivized against. Combine this with not building enough new housing and you get a recipe for rent increases. Even if a minimum wage works as intended, it can only subsidize demand, which would do nothing when the bottleneck is the supply.
Yes the decline of the SRO (or boarding houses in general) is a terrible thing. That said, a living wage should probably afford more than that.
Having a private room is not the same as living alone (having a private apartment/house).
I think it's reasonable for young people to have flatmates and share an apartment, for example.
If a person is working 40 hours a week to contribute to society, then they should be able to afford housing from that society. If a person on minimum wage needs to have a roommate to get by, then that means that their 40 hours a week is not enough to afford their own shelter. Without that roommate, the person goes without a home despite having done their time for society. This is not reasonable.
If it is reasonable for a young person to have flatmates, then that should be because they are a student or an artist and are working only part-time while devoting the rest of their time to their studies or their art.
But a person working full-time? Who may be a single mother or father with a child to support? They should be able to afford a place to live, without roommates.
I would only add that young people or anyone should be able to afford to live alone as you say OR opt to live with roommates to share expenses and save and build wealth. It shouldn't be necessary for anyone working 40 hours a week to pool their resources with other people in similar situations simply to survive.
A minimum wage should not necessarily afford you a median home, that's why it's called a minimum. But for a functional developed nation I argue it should afford you a private room or a very small apartment. Ideally the cost between the two wouldn't be that different, but due to decades of building restrictions the latter does not really exist. This isn't true in Japan for example, where you can find arbitrarily small apartments at correspondingly low prices.
A living wage is for living indefinitely, not just surviving. That should afford more comforts like a reasonable amount of space, a car if needed, and saving for retirement or emergencies.
Is it reasonable for two people who are dating to have to keep their shared apartment when they break up? What should happen if a roommate becomes flaky or moves out?
These are all real situations that make me think that pinning "living wage" to a level where you have to have roommates is not a good goal. You're basically asking people to survive by accepting unstable living conditions and potentially taking strangers into their homes, which isn't exactly "having your needs met."
Its reasonable, but as we've advanced humanity in so many other fields (medical, technical, agricultural) why shouldn't the base standard of living also be increasing.
The base standard of living has increased throughout pretty much all of humanity over the past 50 years, and through huge parts of humanity over even 20 years.
Theres also lots more people, and as more people consume more resources it does not follow that better technology in some field will translate to increased every aspect of life.
I agree with the sentiment, but the premise of capitalism is that those advances also become cheaper due to market efficiencies. In other words, people should be able to have a higher quality of life for relatively lower cost. If/where that actually occurs is a whole different discussion.
A living wage shouldn't be based upon what wages a student could be comfortably living on for a couple years before they get their $500k/yr new grad quant job. It should be based upon what people could live on comfortably indefinitely.
It's not "student wage". It's not "struggling young person" wage. It's "living" wage. It's for living - at any age.
Does this then imply some jobs are not intended to supply a living wage?
Eg does that quants internship get a lower pay because they are expected to graduate beyond it? If so, how do we define what jobs are stepping stones and which are long-term careers?
I think all full time jobs should at a minimum pay a true living wage where one can live comfortably, save for emergencies, etc. If the job cannot pay that then it shouldn't exist.
There are many ways to accomplish this beyond simply raising wages. Better government programs, lower the cost of housing/medical/transportation/food/etc. (these are surprisingly simple but many vested interests don't want this to happen), better retirement programs, etc. etc. etc. You see more of this in more socially democratic countries.
I’m not against that idea but there are some knock-on effects we should be careful of. For example, it will make it hard for younger people to get a job. If I have to pay a teenager the same as someone with a decade or more of work experience, that teenager probably won’t get a job.
With a lot of these discussions, we need to be careful about the seductively simple solutions.
The issue of "which jobs should exist" should be left to the market only. If typical low-end jobs throughout the country pay wages that do not guarantee a minimum living income, the government should simply make up the difference for everyone in a fair way (subject to clawback rates as earned income increases, in order to keep the overall arrangement viable).
(Lowering the cost of essential goods and services is also something that can be done by leveraging the open market. It doesn't take yet another wasteful government program, which is the typical approach in socialist and social-democrat countries.)
Any adult with a full-time job should be able to afford a studio or small apartment. Probably making concessions on the location depending on where they want to live. It's not a matter of being young or not
In the US, this is trivial to do. Theres plenty of states where unskilled entry lever wages easily allows this life, for most of the locations, with the exception of extremely high cost city centers.
Pick IL for example. Min wage $15, so $30k a year income fulltime. Most every adult that’s worked even a little should be able to earn decently more than min, which is for completely unskilled, new workers. Median il wage is 66k.
Even at $30k, the rough 30% rule on housing is $750/mo. At 66k it’s over $1500/mo.
Dig through smaller cities, and you’ll find apartments to rent in either end of this range. This works in any state.
Part of the issue is those smaller cities don’t offer a large supply of job opportunities. So people are often not able to pick and choose their location.
This is an underappreciated argument for basic income/UBI: you need a lot less of it since its very existence enables recipients to move to lower cost of living locations.
(Which in turn opens up opportunities for others to move in to the higher-cost places and boost their own productivity.)
Historically it's reasonable for anybody to have roommates. It's a modern scenario where having your own place is supposed to be the standard.
Historically housing was much smaller. And people lived with their families for a lot longer commonly. A lot less was also spent on domestic appliances (not just washer & dryers) and at-home entertainment (a lot less was spent on entertainment in general).
> Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago
I think others pointed this out but I don't think you can find any data to prove this because its not true.
I'm not a historian but I have seen a number of old movies and in those movies it was very common for the characters to be some poor schlub with a full time job at the factory living in some sort of group home/flophouse situation. Movies tend to reflect stories that resonate with the public at the time so I suspect that is because this was a common situation. I'd much prefer a single roommate in an apartment to a flophouse.
> It seems more reasonable to me to assume that meeting basic shelter needs includes having a private room to oneself
Why would that be reasonable? College students and young adults usually have roommates. I don't feel it's inhumane.
> The only reason to argue otherwise is to try to drive down the wage further
Another reason to argue otherwise is because you care about the truth. Even if you and I agree on the ends, if you use the means of exaggerating or stretching the truth to get there, you are never on my side. Saying that you need to not have roommates to live is an exaggeration.
> Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago
You will never find any data to support that because it isn't true. 50 years ago, flophouses were common. You would share a bedroom room with others, with shared kitchen and bathroom between multiple bedrooms. In college, I lived in a housing-coop network where we slept two to a room. 50 years ago, they slept 4 or 6 to a room in my exact house.
> and the only reason it seems out of reach for many now is because purchasing power has been slowly stagnating for decades, while housing costs have soared in recent times
This is true. But there is a very natural reason why. Look at nearly any US city, and see how many more jobs there are in that city than there were 50 years ago. Then look at how many more homes there are in that city than there were 50 years ago. You will see that the number of new jobs far exceeds the number of new homes. The result is that wealthier people bid up the housing, while poor people are forced to live outside the city and commute. So why have no new houses been built? It can't be helped by the fact that building new homes is illegal. (e.g. buildings with 3 or more apartments are illegal in 70% of san francisco.)
Please direct your anger in the right direction! It's not generally the case that billionaires own thousands of homes, hoarding them while the poor live on the street. It's more often the case that the population has increased while the number of homes in places people want to live has stayed the same. The *only* solution is to increase the number of homes in places people want to live. Raising the minimum wage, taxing the rich, fighting corporations, adding rent control laws, none of that will help solve the root of the problem, the growth rate of homes in cities is far slower than the rate of people wanting to live there!
Hard disagree on this. $26.50 sounds like a nightmare 10 years ago, let alone now. There's a lot of places in the US where having a car is essentially mandatory (actually, most places). If you can't afford a car, that limits where you can live to mostly urban areas, which then pushes the housing cost up.. and by the way, housing costs are always going up, and no, you won't be able to invest in a home, you've been priced out by developers and speculators.
Not to mention you need to be able to save money for unemployment and rainy days..
It’s obviously not required based on the evidence of many people who live and thrive without.
$9000/year is a ton more than just having a car.
I think you're ignoring how much poor people rely on each other and relatives to get by. That's our societies "safety net". That doesn't mean they're "thriving" or even comfortable, nor is it even sustainable (what happens when mom/pop die or require assistance and can't help their kids anymore?).
9000/yr for a car alone isn't crazy at all, just look at average car prices. I just had to do my vehicle renewal today and it was $500 for a 5 year old car that's not particularly expensive! If I look at insurance and car payments, I easily spend over 700 a month. This is on a 30k car, so it's not like I went and bought the biggest luxury vehicle possible.
The average total cost of car ownership in the US in 2025 was about $12,000. $9,000 is already a huge underestimate of what the average person is paying.
That US average includes a lot of new, loaded, financed, comprehensively insured F150’s, not some reasonable minimum.
I lived in a blizzard ridden area using just a 250cc motorcycle, year round, including riding it on the interstate. Layer enough layers, use heated gloves, etc you can easily get by with just a ninja 250, you're not going to burn more than $3-4k a year on that no matter hard you try.
You don't actually need a car unless you have a child or a tradesmen with tools or something like that, a small displacement motorcycle will still take you to 99.9% of the jobs in the lower 48.
"You don't need money if you just do this recklessly dangerous and uncomfortable thing."
(don't worry about how to pay the ambulance bill when you hit some black ice..)
Based on the data sources and the methodology, it looks about as accurate as you could get. They link to their methodology and technical documentation from that site. Even if some resourceful young people you know can get by on less, in general people should not have to live in abject poverty while working a full time job -- I would consider that to be a "Dying Wage".
Ultimately in all these calculators there has to be a threshold that determines whether something is needed for “living” or not. And that varies highly by the individual.
The calculator suggests $5,021 for food, but for me I’d only shop at high-end grocery like Whole Foods and buy organics whenever possible. That’s clearly not enough. On the other hand it suggests $1,792 for internet and mobile which is about double what I actually pay and I have both unlimited mobile data and unlimited home data. Then it claims medical costs of $2,890. For a fit individual with good employer-provided health insurance, that figure should be almost zero.
Ultimately the amount one spends for living depends very much on one’s preferences and these calculators are approximates. I believe you when you say many young people can live for much less, but that doesn’t invalidate the calculator.
> Then it claims medical costs of $2,890. For a fit individual with good employer-provided health insurance, that figure should be almost zero.
No, it won't be almost zero because they're including health insurance premiums in that figure. Few jobs in the US cover 100% of the premiums for their employees.
>> The cost of health care is composed of two subcategories: (1) premiums associated with employer-sponsored health insurance plans and (2) out-of-pocket expenses for medical services, drugs, and medical supplies.
I think “I should be able to fully express my food brand preferences” is not a reasonable standard of livable.
Food choices are highly personal. It’s probably the single most variable expense item here. Who are you decide for someone else whether their food is reasonable enough or not.
Well I’m not the one to decide. That’s why we let individuals allocate money for themselves so they can prioritize what they care about from their resource pool.
Because preferences for food, housing, and healthcare are essentially unbounded, I think you will always have unmet preferences.
When the choice is between organic food (expensive) and eating pesticides that are meant to kill and neuter living organisms (somewhat economical) it's a choice we never should have allowed to even exist in the first place.
Sounds like you need to get the government’s definition of appropriate foods changed. And then come back to the question of livability.
It must be more nuanced than you say, as millions of people reach old age without sharing your concern.
Organic food still uses pesticides.
> For example, transportation costs are $9000/year and housing is $20000/year. These are both way more than is necessary.
Even on the smaller things. "Internet & Mobile" for where I am jumped out to me. Based on the difference between 1 adult and 2 adults, it's $582 per person-year for mobile (which I guess isn't far off if you get a good new phone every 2 years, it's reasonable enough) and with that subtracted, internet is $100 per month. The methodology page says "County-level data on the cost of internet comes from research on lowest-cost monthly plans from BroadbandNow", but even that page shows much cheaper options available (including the $70 per month Google Fiber I have).
This depends a lot on where you live. In our area, the minimum internet-only offering from Spectrum is $125 (approximately) after taxes/fees, and the only "competitor" is AT&T, which is more expensive for (at least in our area) worse / flakier service.
I was surprised (at least for Birmingham/AL/Jefferson County) how accurately it pegged _most_ of the costs -- childcare here is closer to $12k/annum/child so that one was the only one I pegged as 'off' - they show 2 children as $16k and that's a ~$8k underestimate
I think I have great access. I pay $60/month for gig internet and that’s split with 4 people.
I spend $20/month for mobile and buy a new $500 phone every 3 years.
I make way more than a livable wage, but spend much less than their projected costs.
yeah, I spend $30/month on internet (the 100 Mbps Google Fiber, since I realized I didn't really need 1 Gbps at home now that I go into the office every day...)
I am but a single datapoint, but the $100/month for home internet hits quite close to home. I currently pay $130 for Spectrum's gigabit cable internet plan. Their website offers it for $70, but that's only for the first year; they have raised that price by, apparently, $20 per year I've been a customer. We do not have fiber and my only other ISP option is a DSL provider that maxes out at 40mbps for $30. So sure, I can save about 75% on my internet bill by opting for internet that is 4% of the speed that I currently pay for. And this is in a rapidly growing suburb. I think $100/month is easily the case for places like my home, where local broadband monopolies still exist mostly unchallenged.
I disagree. Living wage is not minimum wage.
The web site also makes that distinction: living wage, poverty wage, and minimum wage.
That is the point isn't it.
The minimum wage is far below what it takes to actually 'live', like have a place to live and a car.
I have found if you scroll all the way to the right, you get the living wage with multiple roommates and bumming a ride to work or waiting for the bus. My area most of the full-time entry level fast food/Walmart/gas station jobs pay about a dollar less than that number.
"Living wage" means what a household needs for a dignified life, not just for bare subsistence.
If you need roommates because you can't afford an apartment on your own, you are poor by definition. That's probably the most universal definition of poverty that has ever existed. As long as there have been houses, the baseline household has had a housing unit of their own. Households that have to share housing with others have always been characterized as unusually poor, no matter the continent and the millennium.
> Households that have to share housing with others have always been characterized as unusually poor, no matter the continent and the millennium.
Historically speaking this is incredibly wrong.
Nearly every culture evolved from some sort of shared communal longhouse to individual clan homes, to extended family homes. The idea of individual private rooms actually comes about explicitly from Manors in the late medieval ages. We really didn't see widespread individual homes until the industrial revolution. In places like the East, individual rooms were an import from the West.
Even in rare places where there were individual family homes (Ancient Egypt, for one). Privacy and individuality were just not concepts. Through the 1800s, you might have literally been sharing a bed with a stranger in a hotel.
There has also never, ever been a point in human history where living without some sort of roommate was common. Even in situations where you had lots of single workers, they almost always lived in bunkhouses or SROs.
Not dignified. As you can live a dignified life for much less.
Thus my point. I don’t know what “livable wage” means with these numbers so it’s not very useful for discussion or planning or measurement.
They probably are overshooting, I agree. But then again the "living wage" for a healthy person is a lot less than for a not-quite healthy person or a sick person.
The average person is not-quite healthy, at best.
Are those people funding their retirement? Are they going to be able to take care of themselves as health issues come up? Are they receiving support from family?
Edit: also the housing cost is probably factoring in a studio or maybe a 1bd for a single person. That may seem luxurious to you, but for many that is the only real option they have (roommates are hard to come by and can hurt you physically and fiscally).
No, roommates aren’t hard to come by. As evidenced by the millions who have roommates.
In my 20s everyone I knew had roommates. And it was a good life.
Saying a studio or 1 bedroom is required makes this metric pretty ambiguous.
Thus my point, that this isn’t what’s required to just live. But to live comfortably.
> This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.”
An appartment and a car aren't exactly luxury goods. Cars are often needed to work, and well, having a roof over your head is usually required for a decent living.
Sure, if you fancy living in a cardboard box located next to your work, your living standards are going to be much easier to attain.
$700/month on car+gas+insurance is certainly pretty cushy. This is a luxury for many people I know.
Their cost estimates are much higher than what’s required to live comfortably and save for a rainy day.
This is such a US centric take.
Because the calculator is an US-only calculator.
It's a Living Wage Calculator for US States!
MIT is a school in the US.
where very few (relatively) people commute by car
The website is US-specific, so....
Dell me you didn’t click the link without… ah fuck it who cares, almost nobody around here does.
I do think it's a crack up how when I check my own "living wage" i still under-perform in comparison to the chart, but in my county i'm within the top 15%.
Needless to say; only old people have homes and only those who have sufficient help get a nice appt.
Why should we accept that rather than our own standards? If we take your tack on this then we shouldn't try to make anything better for anyone, just live with what we've got and accept whatever lot we find ourselves in.
You're confusing poverty with living.
Having a roommate and an annual transportation budget under $9000 probably isn’t the right demarcation line for poverty.
You're confusing staying alive with living
Edit: Deleted for dumb math
> $130k per year needed ($28.50 per hour * 40 * 52).
What math are you doing to get $130k with those numbers? That wage works out to around $60k/year.
Your 130k number is >2x what it should be. Recalculate.
28/hr is closer to 60k/yr.
130k/yr is more like 65/hr.
Is a living wage there bare minimum to live or enough to live a life?
I don’t make a living wage for my region and while I can afford food and a room to rent, I can’t really live a decent life, save for the future or invest in myself, I just barely get by every paycheque to paycheque. Thanks
> Is a living wage there bare minimum to live or enough to live a life?
More the former. A lot of the commenters here are missing that detail. A living wage doesn't mean you can afford all the nice things, it means you aren't starving and can cover the needs for you and your family, but maybe not many wants.
> live on much less than this.
They do not actually live on less, they sacrifice their health or well-being in order to meet the constraint.
I would argue the calculator grossly underestimates necessities because most of these jobs are not doable in old age, so you need to account for saving $1 for each $1 you make, to support yourself while old. You also need an emergency fund, because in the US you get billed $1000 for the most random shit at the most random time.
I got billed $5000 randomly for an echodardiogram because insurance didn't pay for it despite them saying they would. At least I have $5K to spare, but considering that can happen, that needs to be considered a basic necessity.
“optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.”
If you can't live alone with a car? Then what do you think you are doing?
"Living wage" means the ability to live, not scrape by with the bare minimum possible.
I feel like I’ve eat pretty well, and my household food costs are almost half what the calculator shows. Similar for vehicle costs etc.
After looking at the method, I think the calculator probably has some bias towards “what society has convinced us we need”. To a certain extent that is a relative and subjective perception problem, and one exacerbated when you live in a society with a lot of consumer debt.
The yearly cost of food for one person without children in the county of Los Angeles(I selected an expensive area on purpose) is showing 4,428 USD. That's about 12 dollars a day. I don't even live in the United States but that value looks pretty low if anything.
Anecdotally, I can easily eat for $12/day even in Seattle. There are days when I probably spend half of that. We aren't talking beans and rice here, these are diverse satisfying meals. It does require you to cook though.
I can easily cook all my meals for $12/day.
I don’t consider daily or even weekly restaurants part of a necessity for life.
People have commutes and work shifts that don't always allow them to buy food in bulk and cook their own food.
Not everybody is like you.
Restaurants have never been a necessity for life, but I guess that for a lot of people you should be upper class to eat out once a week.
That’s pretty surprising, honestly, because there are other areas considered much lower COL that are within spitting distance of that value.
What does eating pretty well mean to you? Maybe you don't even if you think you do? We don't know without your budget or a receipt from your typical grocery run
Also some folks are just smaller than others.
They do try to account for this in their method. Men, women, and children of different ages all have different amounts of assumed food intake
Mostly what the typical nutritional guidance has advocated consistently over the last few decades, with maybe slightly higher protein intake.
6-8 servings of fruits and vegetables a day, fairly liberal amounts of dairy and lean protein, lesser amounts of red meat. Grains like breads/rice for additional carbohydrates.
Admittedly, avoiding eating out regularly is the #1 way I keep food costs down, though.
My household food costs are about 20% more than what the calculator shows (and that's a very minimal budget)
Behold, "averages" are not perfect.
Are you following the USDA thrifty food plan like the methodology assumes?
I don't perfectly weigh our groceries every week to hit the exact counts they recommend, no.
But we stick to the essentials, utilize different stores for the lowest prices we can get, and don't purchase nonsense.
Would you agree that large uncertainties can bring into question the validity of a model?
Ie “averages” with large variances are not often very informative
I agree that the very term "averages" implies "an average".
That’s what I think when I hear the term, too. But these numbers are not just living, but living at a pretty high standard.
I would expect living wage to mean the amount one needs to be able to live out your life fairly decently and with dignity. I think many do so without having pay this high.
Is a family of 4 in a 2BR considered living wage? Because they have rent at $3600 for a family in silicon valley... which seems impossible. I paid more than that when I graduated from college with a roommate 20 years ago.
The older I get the more I realize how fraught the idea of a "living wage" is.
Through mid life, your financial health is not as determined by wages, but by your family/connections. Do you have access to a grandmother who can babysit? A decent second-hand car? A good roommate situation? Just look at the expense table - any one of these things could be worth up to 20% of your income!
And you see that literally right here - are any of us actually comfortable with the idea that the value of your labor should be determined by your marriage status and number of children?
It's kind of telling that countries with "successful" minimum wages either don't have one and just institutionalize collective bargaining, or they do some fancy calculations that start with prevailing median wages and welfare eligibility. The idea of trying to get this number from the bottom up by building expenses just doesn't seem very robust.
It needs to be because the US has leaned further into individualism relative to other countries. If society's golden metric of success means being able to acquire all of these luxuries or services purely through monetary means as transactional individuals, don't be too surprised when the expenses rack up.
I think it also reflects a lense of US academia. It kind of assumes a sanitized, formal, self-sufficient life, detached from others - and then assumes anything other than that is an aberration.
It's kind of like the physics joke about assuming a spherical cow in a vacuum.
Just because the wider society encourages it, your family doesn't have to lean into individualism, and many don't. We got by when I was a kid with a lot of help from friends and family, when I am absolutely sure we didn't have a living wage under this definition.
Did you fairly compensate your friends and family members for that "help"? Systematic reliance on wholly unpaid labor is not exactly something to be proud of.
Um, sometimes people help each other because they want to, or because they understand that those less fortunate than them need it, or because they understand that they may need help someday and so it doesn't make sense to make a big deal of "compensation" now. It's called community, and I think it is something to be proud of.
2080 hours per year! That's 52 weeks of 40 hours per week. It's also inhuman.
Here in Norway we have five weeks of holiday plus various public holidays and only 37.5 hours per week adding up to about 1700 hours per year.
Urban workers in China do 3,744 hours per year; farmers do 2400 hours
Norwegian workers do 1,418 hours per year, one of the lowest in the world
> Urban workers in China do 3,744 hours per year
For reference, that's 10:15 per day, 365 days a year. Or 996 without vacations, if you intend to have one day off.
996 has never been a standard work duration for urban workers in China, aside from some tech companies that promoted performative work ethics. And even there, people do take vacations.
3744 hours. Dayum!
Just going off basic numbers:
- 3744/52/5 = 14.4 hour day if they work 5 days a week
- 3744/52/6 = 12 hrs if they work 6 days a week
- 3744/52/7 = 10.3 hrs if they work 7 days a week.
That is, indeed, what 9-9-6 means: 9am-9pm (12hrs) * 6 days per week.
9-9-6 is also not full productivity for 9-9-6.
Office workers will eat lunch, take a 1-2hr nap in the afternoon, and also eat dinner with their coworkers within the common 9-9-6 rhythm. It still takes a significant chunk of time, but the actual working time butt-in-chair is closer to 54 hours
You lose productivity doing 996 anyways so how can you maximize past that?
I think they just do that to get to an hourly rate. It’s probably better to look at the annual income and think of that number regardless of how many hours you worked during the year.
Yeah, oil nations are different. Norway's resources are well-managed, but oil nations with outsourced defence just have different constraints.
Every single nation on Earth has mandatory paid vacation, except for the United States and three tiny islands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b....
Edit: And looking into it a little, I'm pretty sure two of those islands actually do have mandatory paid leave after a minimum period of employment.
I don't get what the big deal is about mandatory paid vacation. My view is that your total compensation will be set based on the market value of your labor. Some portion of that compensation is given to you in the form of ordinary wages and some portion in the form of paid vacations. If the government mandated paid vacations would it increase many people's total compensation?
In my European mind (I have 25 mandated days off per year), if there was not a mandatory paid vacation limit two things would happen:
1. Further exploit desperate people since those that don't need to work at any cost would steer clear of jobs that have 0 holidays. 2. You would further penalize people with families where both parents work. It is well understood that if your kid is sick you can't really use your sick days and so must use your PTO days. Having 0 available days doesn't play well with having kids (personal experience).
And finally, having mandated PTO allow you to actually take holidays. I heard too many times of companies that offer unlimited PTO and when the employer tries to take some they sabotage him/her or plainly threaten his/her job security.
The easiest answer is yes, since many Americans currently earn minimum wage with no paid vacation, minimum wage with mandatory vacation would be an increase in total compensation. I don't know how paid leave regulations impact wage growth in general, I'm sure there is research on this but I didn't immediately find anything.
Another way to think about it: why do we have building codes? We don't want to incentivize builders to cut corners that would risk an electrical fire or falling down in an earthquake or something in order to offer a cheaper price, so we make it illegal. If unsafe buildings are allowed, it makes it difficult for safe builders to stay in the market. Similarly, we don't want to incentivize workers to sell their labor with zero leave in order to offer a cheaper price, because that risks unhealthy and insular communities (literally unhealthy if people can't take sick leave), poor mental health, unhealthy childcare practices, an unhealthy civic environment if people can't take time off to vote or volunteer, etc. The labor market is competitive and people will sacrifice paid leave if they have to, because they need money to live, so we should make it illegal to remove the incentive.
Wages and time off are not frictionlessly interchangeable in the vast majority of jobs. Mandating minimum levels for both helps make sure people have access to both.
> total compensation will be set based on the market value of your labor.
No, you do not want that.
The market value of most people's labour is very close to zero.
Left to the market most of the population would live just below starvation, a very small group of owners would live very well, and a small group of artisans would do OK supporting the tiny group.
That is where many countries are heading
For a lot of us, work is not our life. Turns out that most people really want a paid vacation. Smart Capitalists know that it's easier to extract value from workers with higher morale.
If you would rather trade your paid vacation for an extra week of pay, I am sure you and your boss can work it out. Companies pay out unused vacation all the time. Just don't ruin it for the rest of us!
Unless you have a union, there's a dramatic power imbalance between you (the employee) and the employer at the negotiating table. I'd urge you to read up about the 19th century labor movement and what conditions prompted it.
Mandatory vacation, like education, mandatory IDs, and myriad other laws are the sole jurisdiction of the individual States to decide. There will never be a "US" law about these things. Most questions that start with "why is the US the only country..." can be explained by the fact that the States decide and the US government can't force the States to make laws.
Similarly, there is no US law against most crimes. It doesn't mean those laws don't exist in every State.
That said, there is no State with mandatory paid vacation either AFAIK.
Given the political diversity of the States, this suggests that mandatory paid vacation is either not considered an important issue by people across the political spectrum or there are existing regulations that would create real problems if there paid vacation was mandated without changing those regulations first.
There has been a federal law for mandatory family and medical leave for 30+ years (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fmla). It is unpaid and doesn't cover all workers, but that's a legislative detail that could be changed. I don't see any legal or constitutional reason that unpaid leave can be federal but paid leave can't.
It would be interesting to know which percentage of full-time jobs in the USA get no paid vacation.
France is not an oil nation. We have 35h weeks and 5 weeks of paid vacation as well.
Edit: Also, the US is a damn oil nation. It has nothing to do with oil, and everything to do with politics.
Yes, and your government takes 57% of the total GDP to themselves, rely on an external power (that’s less and less friendly) for their protection and are on the track to their 6th prime minister in less than 2 years (is it 6th? I’ve lost track) because if they try to increase the retirement age above 62 (in their pay as you go unmaintanable system) people come down to the streets to burn down businesses and destroy public property.
Spain and Portugal were in pretty much the same boat not too long ago and they've started to reform of their own accord. The French will come around once the bond vigilantes start taking a serious look at that whole government deficit+debt situation and unsustainable retirement ages. Of course it will be painful and involve severe austerity measures, but that's what it takes.
France has stuck is head in the sand regarding its future finances
So has the US, difference is the US citizens don't get anything good out of their debt.
> US citizens don't get anything good out of their debt
Partly because they're paying for drug innovation and defense for other countries.
As if the US hasn’t!
I’m not sure that’s the key factor. Resource wealth helps, but it doesn’t automatically translate into shorter workweeks or generous leave. Countries with far fewer natural resources—such as Germany, the Netherlands, or Denmark—still manage shorter working hours, strong labor protections, and substantial paid vacation.
Those outcomes depend much more on labor policy, bargaining power, and what governments choose to protect. In many places, business pressure and media framing make long hours seem unavoidable, even though they’re ultimately the result of policy choices.
> Countries with far fewer natural resources—such as Germany, the Netherlands
Where do you think the term "Dutch disease" came from?
In Germany its somewhere between 1600-1700 hours, and we don't have much oil
The other Nordic countries don't have oil riches and manages just fine.
The cost of childcare seems way underestimated, at least for young children.
It shows $13,641 for my metro (Chicago), but day care costs are easily twice that. Obviously once kids are school-age this is much lower (if going to public school), so maybe that's how you get at this figure.
On the other hand the transportation costs are way overestimated for non-car families (we spend less than $2k/year on local transit for 2 adults and 1 child, obviously this doesn't include airfare for vacations or whatnot). Maybe these are both an artifact of too broad a catchment area (childcare is probably cheaper in the 'burbs, but so likely are average transportation costs).
Someone is siphoning your value. It's quite obvious when you track the productivity, or ask questions about how did your great-grandpa survive at all without machines. Just stating the obvious, don't mind me.
They lived in a house or apt with a third the sqft/person that was far more likely to catch fire and didn't have AC.
If they had a car they most likely shared it. It was far less safe, didn't have AC, guzzled gas and polluted.
Never ate out and spent a third of earnings on cheap grocery store staples.
College and healthcare was much cheaper, and they got a lot less of it.
We're benefiting greatly from the increase in productivity. We just view our great-grandfather luxuries as our necessities.
>They lived in a house or apt with a third the sqft/person that was far more likely to catch fire and didn't have AC.
But at least they could afford a house, right? I think a lot of people would accept living in a house without AC and more likely to catch fire. Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well.
>If they had a car they most likely shared it. It was far less safe, didn't have AC, guzzled gas and polluted.
Car technology in the past was worse, we know that. Cars were more affordable though.
>Never ate out and spent a third of earnings on cheap grocery store staples.
Like today then.
>We're benefiting greatly from the increase in productivity. We just view our great-grandfather luxuries as our necessities.
Young people are rotting at home unable to go ahead with their lives because wages nowadays are not enough to pay for a house and a family. Why do people try to deny this obvious reality? Productivity didn't benefit everyone equally and people in the past had more opportunities to build a life inside a standard that was socially acceptable.
>more likely to catch fire
>Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well.
I assume by catch fire GP means electrical wiring? Many houses on market today are literally not remodeled since the 1940s so retain that original wiring.
All you've done here is take the tired dishonest "kids these days and their darn avocado toast and smartphones" trope and used different goods/services to spin it in a way to appeal to the median commentor on HN.
You're ignoring the gorilla in the room. Why can't one live in a comparable manner today and bank the difference? Because those things aren't available? Why aren't those things available?
> You're ignoring the gorilla in the room. Why can't one live in a comparable manner today and bank the difference?
For two reasons.
1. They're illegal. You're not allowed to build a house to 1936 climate, safety, and fire codes with un-licensed labor. And boarding houses were effectively banned.
2. Market. Most people would rather live in a smaller apartment than 1936 style un-climate controlled death trap.
And the reasons are the same for cars. You legally can't see a new version of a 1936 car, and even if you could most people would rather drive an old civic.
> Why can't one live in a comparable manner today and bank the difference?
You can do this. Just move to a sparsely populated area and work remote. Rural and semi-rural areas are basically the "poor", lower productivity areas within any given country, if you can arbitrage the incomes difference via remote work you stand to gain quite a bit.
Yeah I think people need to start asking the question, "Where is the money going". Its not just inexistent, its literally going somewhere other than your pocket.
They're not voting against their own self interest; they just have different interests than you. Their primary interest and goal is making sure their out-group is hurting, and that is what they are voting for, regardless of that happens to them.
It's rent seeking, the antithesis of capitalism. It's always been. Enabled by abuse of government power. And no, it's not a partisan issue.
You see this pattern across the American economy. The boomers locked in their house values by passing all the zoning regulations to artificially restrict the supply of housing. AMA artificially restricts the supply of doctors to increase their wages. Accreditation pushed ever higher costs on universities which increased costs, and the availability of loans basically cut off the brake cable. And who do you think is really benefitting from all the companies enshittifying everything and pushing up costs? The billionaires and retirees of course. And the young/working people are paying for it.
The solution for individuals is arbitrage. Remote work, get healthcare abroad, and avoid college tuitions. The fact that these things make sense at all shows how broken the markets are.
And that someone is mostly government, which is a growing and increasingly wasteful fraction of GDP. We really need to start reining in the national debt and government spending. Drain the swamp.
No, it's rentiers. The government takes about a quarter but the rentiers easily take 2 times as much in interest, monthly fees, and other costs that I have to pay in perpetuity. You just don't consider that because you think those people are necessary for living a good life. In reality their purpose is to extract as much money from you for as little work as possible.
Yes, the rent is too damn high. The way to address that is BUILDING MORE! Which is what YIMBY is all about.
As long as collusion exists, I don't see this changing. Manhattan is more expensive than it was a 100 years ago but less people actually live there now. Not a little less either - 700,000 people less. We've built way more housing at the same time. And yes, people have more square footage per person now but the housing doubled and the population went down dramatically.
Rent is always going to go up there even if they build more. Same in other places. As long as rent setting tools exist to collude - we will see the rent not go down. You're not gonna dump $100m in new buildings and not maximize your return.
Reminder that the Republicans' policy has been to starve the beast. That is push up government costs while passing huge tax cuts (like the big beautiful bill Republicans just passed that is greatly increasing the debt) in order to sabotage government's ability to function, then blast from every rooftop that we need to cut government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
"The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism."
--Theodore Roosevelt
This has been posted many times before, and AFAICT it’s fundamentally misleading, as it doesn’t account for transfer payments (refundable tax credits, food stamps, housing vouchers, ACA subsidies, …)
That artificially inflates the “wage level” needed for the estimated living standard. It also makes the tax figures absurd. No two-parent, two-kid household making $110K is paying 15% of that net in taxes, subtracting deductions, credits and subsidies.
IOW, our “safety net” for middle-income parents could get 5X more generous and this calculator would show the same results.
A lot of the safety net also goes poof if you have the living wage. So I'm not sure exactly how your argument works. Are you saying the minimum wage should be under the poverty wage and everyone with that wage should depend on safety nets as it is now?
How are they getting medical costs in San Mateo County so wrong.
$11,896 with 2 children? My Kaiser $14K deductible bronze plan costs $2100 a month. That's more like $25K a year, and that's before I use it... the only reason I have it is in case something traumatic happens. This is the cheapest plan I can get on covered california.
I assume that's not an employer sponsored plan? You can read the methodology for more, but their data is a mix of a) how much people pay into employer-sponsored health insurance plans, b) individual and small group insurance market information, where available, and c) estimated out-of-pocket expenses not covered by insurance. If you're buying a plan through a marketplace, you are almost certainly going to come in well above the median for your area.
Puerto Rico is always left out of these analyses. AFAIK we are included in the same data sources (like dol.gov), so I'm always disappointing to see the exclusion.
I fell out of love with the living wage when the UK government bumped minimum wage and called it living wage. The government kept on getting raked over the coals by charities who claimed that people working minimum wage were in poverty and so our govenrment bumped the minimum wage by a bit and then announced it as "This is the new NATIONAL LIVING WAGE". Which is just perfect politics. You're the government, so you can just take a term. Trump can brand the Gulf of America, and the UK Tories can just redefine the living wage. Now those charities are stuffed because any time they talk about a living wage everyone gets confused, it cuts the legs out of the conversation.
The core of the problem is that you basically have to have someone define what is an acceptable standard of living. Sharing a flat? Nah, the MIT trained economist thinks that's for the poverty people so that is defined as below living wage. Walk to work? No. You need atleast $10k a year on travel otherwise you're a bus wanker.
A huge amount of this is value judgements on what is an acceptable standard of living from people who benefit from immense privilege but will never experience the thing they're studying.
Anecdotally, I found some of the costs like food and food to be inflated.
When I looked at the methodology, some is based on consumer surveys so it may be more reflective of over-consumption. In other words, it prices in what people want or what they’re used to, not what they need. The counterpoint is that maybe some wealthy countries should be pricing in a higher quality of life, but the “living wage” then becomes a bit of a misnomer.
Anecdotally their numbers are significantly higher for my city than what I actually spend in some categories. I am not frugal by any stretch of the imagination, you would have to be pretty careless and/or irresponsible to hit some of those numbers. On the other hand, the living wage is below the actual minimum wage in some cases.
If you look at US BLS and Federal Reserve studies on such things, they make a distinctions between what people actually spend on ordinary expenses and when people can no longer afford those categories of expenses.
An interesting artifact is that incomes across the 15-40th percentile range in the same city don't save much money but still have enough money to pay for all ordinary expenses. That is a wide range of incomes for people nominally spending their entire income on the same things. What actually seems to happen is that average people spend excess income on upgrading their lifestyle until they hit the 40th percentile, at which point the average person starts saving some of their additional excess income.
Yes, that's what makes it a living wage instead of a poverty wage, let alone a starvation wage.
The larger point I’m making is the “living wage” may be built on an idea that the assumed consumerist norm is ideal.
Like food and shelter?
If you enter in a US city, another takeaway from the rendered table is that U.S. living standards (measured economically) continued to improve for some time after the 1970s despite weak wage growth largely because *more households relied on two earners instead of one*. While productivity kept rising, the gains were increasingly captured at the top and not shared with the workers. Of course that buffer is now long gone, but wages haven't kept up.
seems jusssttt a touch low. like by half
Can anyone speak to the reliability of using metropolitan statistical areas for something like this? Having lived across on both sides of the tracks in a few, grouping them for something like this seems like an interesting choice. One that I probably wouldn't agree with, but I'm out of my depth
The problem with defining “living wage” is you must trust that the person defining it has your best interests in mind, and is calculating it while including _your_ needs.
For example, you don’t want me to be the one to define “living wage.” I’ve been a prepper/bushcrafter for 20 years… the ACTUAL “living wage” is _zero_. There are innumerable resources all around you if you know how to find and use them.
The standard of living that one could afford with a "living wage" looks to be very very low. Like, 0 vacations and no house low, for my metro area.
And for my area it is very high. I live in a cheap midwest town and according to this, the difference between here and San Francisco is only 30k a year.
Yes, this is supposed to be the number at which you aren't going to go into (medical, auto) debt, make rent/utilities each month, and not starve. It is by no means intended to represent a life containing any luxuries.
Basically a "ramen profitable" calculator.
This calculator says that the median household in my county is not making a living wage, which is ridiculous on its face.
There is something wrong with the transportation cost. I live in a poor rural county, and it says the 0-child transportation cost is $10k+. People's trucks here don't even cost that much, and they don't drive far. I see it counts as 2 working adults, but it's still grossly inflated.
Are you factoring in fuel, repairs, maintenance, registration/taxes, and insurance? As well as depreciation?
I questioned that too, but vehicle costs are based off surveyed data. So if the average 2 adults have a car payment, insurance, fuel, and repair costs, it’s probably reflected in their data. To me, that’s different than saying “a reasonable mode of reliable transportation”
I don't think it's appropriate to use the average vehicle costs for the living wage. It overestimates how much people on that wage spend on their vehicles.
For example, the average new-vehicle price in December 2025 was about $50,000. But people earning the living wage mostly aren't buying that kind of car. They could buy a new car for less than half that, or buy a used car. Or they may choose to take public transit.
Housing data is flawed. Even if you’re single, no kids, you’re limited to what is available and 1 bedrooms in my state can’t be had for less than $1500/mo anywhere in the state. Yet this says housing costs annually would be $12000. How? I think the data this is based off of is super stale.
> Yet this says housing costs annually would be $12000. How?
Having roommates is extremely common.
There are also a lot of room-for-rent situations that don’t show up on the websites listing apartments. If you’re tapped into local networks of younger people there’s always someone with a room for rent or a group of friends looking for someone to take over a room in a house they’re renting together. Not helpful for someone in their 50s moving to a new city, but for young people living on a budget this is just how it works and has for a long time.
Roommate listings are for $1000/mo. I still think it’s grossly under what a typical person would need.
Read the second half of my comments: You're not going to find these roommate situations on public websites. The publicly listed ones are intentionally high.
I'm guessing it uses the cost of a studio for a single person.
Which can’t be had for less than $1500/mo here. Studio/1bed are the same.
I never rented a 1-bedroom apartment until I was married. A studio/efficiency is fine for singles, or even a room.
Studio/1bed are the same thing here. It’s the same price, same sqft.
It's basically out of date, since the housing market has changed so rapidly.
For Phoenix[0] it shows $44 for 1 adult 1 child, but $42 for 2 adults 1 child with 1 adult working. Is this because of a child tax credit or something?
[0]: https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/38060
I was wondering this too. I assume it’s because child care costs are lower when one parent isn’t working(?)
No, it's because their model puts dollar values on the labor contributed by non-working adults w/r/t raising children. So in that case, it could be that 1adult1child is slightly higher because of the need to pay for childcare, while the food/insurance/clothing etc of the additional adult in 2adult1child is offset by the fact that the non-working adult will conduct childcare and thus that expense goes away.
But then why is the number higher for 2adult1child (1 working) when compared to 2adult1child(both working). wouldn't child raising costs get added back in once both are working?
right. kind of obvious in hindsight.
This whole dataset needs to be downloadable, instead of being behind their UI..
I'm going to base it off of the peninsula (San Mateo County) in the Bay Area for a single person. https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/06081
By my estimations, it's not a great calculator. $2.5k/month for all housing costs. I'm not saying it's not possible to find a studio + utilities but that's not a fun place to live. No AC, no insulation, built for a different climate which was 70 years ago, laundromat or (hopefully) coin-op laundry in building, likely near busy roads (101, el camino) or train tracks with no sound insulation, still extremely car dependent (which is included in this calculator - gas/electricity, taxes, and cars in CA are very expensive), etc. Again, doable but competitive market and not a fun one. You'd be guaranteed to NEVER own any property at that income. Until we have some public housing utopia, I'd say ownership should be accounted for in a living wage. Otherwise, you're gonna get evicted when retirement hits.
Its calculation on taxes seems off to me as well. https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator#... Says $72308 in San Mateo, CA gives you $55793 - not $59791. You'd have to make close to $80k/yr to get the amount they suggest to live.
This calculator does not include retirement savings, emergency saving, etc. It just assumes you'll comfortably live paycheck to paycheck until you die and never save a dime. In our country, you will not be getting $60k/yr post tax from social security. So, this is a stupid calculator unless you plan to never retire or never experience job loss (max payout is $450/week for unemployment in CA), etc.
> This calculator does not include retirement savings, emergency saving, etc. It just assumes you'll comfortably live paycheck to paycheck until you die and never save a dime. In our country, you will not be getting $60k/yr post tax from social security. So, this is a stupid calculator unless you plan to never retire or never experience job loss (max payout is $450/week for unemployment in CA), etc.
It doesn't include those things because those aren't the things that are covered by a "living wage". Living wage sounds like something good, but it's literally just enough to cover what's needed. Can you afford housing, childcare, medical care, transportation for work, etc. It's a low bar, not a good target, for a society to try to hit. It means people at that wage shouldn't be going hungry or without shelter, but they won't necessarily be thriving.
Right, and I think we shouldn't even be talking about a fake ass "living" wage when it's so disconnected from what you actually need to reliably "live" in these environments. I don't know who comes up with these terms but it's terrible. It may as well be called, "absolute minimum amount of money to get by without anything ever bad happening or planning for the future at all" wage.
US only it seems?
This is very cool to see all compiled and easily navigable.
The thing I want to see next would be the sister calculator: what it would take for a business of X size employees, Y revenue, Z other expenses, to increase wages to these standards.
This feels like it would help to close that gap. Give a business owner a concrete path to take. Just saying something is broken isn't going to get it fixed.
Just typing all this I think I have my weekend project lined up.
Thanks MIT!
Pretty good, but not granular enough. For example, the area I grew up in is much cheaper to live in that the metro it is tagged to. The two areas are separated by 15 miles (~24km).
If you live in a large city, then it works great.
Does this base itself on the metric started in 1963, that was eseentially a big guess that 3x starvation level was well off? because we have better numbers now. Avg us salary is 60k, but to take car of the needs of a family of 4, not in starvation range is ~$160k/year
How can you need that much money to not starve?
According to Wikipedia[1] median household income in the US and Norway is only about a quarter of your 160 kUSD.
I'm pretty sure that most of the people living near me in Norway are not high earners but I don't see any signs of starvation either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
Norway has many wonderful things American voters are terrified of giving people less they use them.
USA site. USA metrics. USA Comment. I vote to get the same things you all have, but your assumption is that Norway matters in this context is foolish
> not in starvation range is ~$160k/year
That highly depends on your definition of "need" and where you live. If you're in a city with ludicrous cost of living, like San Fransisco, then sure. But, that's also why people commute, or just choose to go somewhere cheaper. It's somewhat shocking seeing how much higher the standard of living is, with much less income, outside the big cities.
In the U.S., a family of four technically doesn't need any money "not to starve," because SNAP covers the cost of groceries if providers are unable.
https://livingwage.mit.edu/pages/methodology
Put in an area and see for yourself. In general, yes this calculator is closer to what you're describing. For example, Skamania County, a pretty rural county of Washington state with a very low population of 12,000 people, still has a "required living wage" for 1 breadwinner + 1 homemaker + 3 children of $104,292 per year: https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/53059
That feels pretty close to accurate.
Yeah Dallas county Texas, where I live, for family of 4 and 2 working adults is around $105k/year. That seems close, there’s nothing secure about that long term (no room for savings or retirement) but it’s livable.
I think I'm mis-understanding.
How is 1 adult + 3 children at $107.95 and 2 adults + 3 children at $63.97
5 people could require more money than 4. You could say in the 2nd case it's $63.97x2 but that doesn't make any sense either because the table also has 1 adult 0 children $29.31 and 2 adults 0 children at $41.81. Clearly they are not doing 2x to that $41.81 as it would be more than the $29.31 at 2x
Was this AI generated?
There are separate columns for 2 ADULTS (1 WORKING) and 2 ADULTS (BOTH WORKING). I think you are mixing up the two.
And the non-working adult is taking care of children, so reducing childcare expenses.
I am not mixing up the 2
First row, for https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/06075
The only way these numbers make sense if if you assume one income. Then Given the first example was one income, this 2nd one makes no sense. 5 people cost more than 4. These numbers are wrong.1. This is not ai generated.
2. Did you look in the costs breakdown? You'll probs find your answers there.
3. I am guessing having a spare adult to take care of 3 children instead of paying for childcare is probably the difference.
Child care.