An analysis of 3,062 U.S. counties · Zillow home values against Census household income
When I first put a map of median home prices online, the most common reaction was some version of "sure, but those cheap places are cheap for a reason." That's fair. It also skips over something more interesting, which is that a low price tag and an attainable home are not the same thing — and once you measure them separately, a lot of the map rearranges itself.
So I pulled median household income from the Census Bureau for every county and divided home value by it. The result is the price-to-income ratio: roughly how many years of a typical local income it would take to buy a typical local home. Housing researchers have used this measure for decades, and the rough convention is that about 3× income is manageable and 5× or above is severely stretched.
Across 3,062 counties with both figures available, the median comes out at 3.7×. About 26% of counties sit at or below 3×. About 17% are at 5× or worse.
Owsley County, Kentucky has a median home value of $141,654. On a national price map it sits near the bottom — dark, cheap, the sort of place people point at when they say housing is only unaffordable if you insist on living somewhere expensive.
Median household income in Owsley County is $22,188.
That works out to 6.4× income — a worse ratio than roughly 95% of counties in the country. A household earning the local median would need six and a half years of gross income — not savings, gross income — to cover a typical local house. The house is cheap. Buying it is not.
To put that in perspective, here are some places where a typical local household is closer to affording a typical local home than in Owsley County:
Fairfax County is the one I keep coming back to. The typical home there costs about five and a half times what the typical home in Owsley County costs. It is also, measured against what people who live there actually earn, easier to buy.
Owsley isn't alone, and the pattern has a shape to it. Socorro County, New Mexico: $199,187 homes, $36,570 income, 5.4×. Hancock County, Tennessee: $180,167 against $34,960, 5.2×. Greene County, Alabama: $135,952 against $29,200, 4.7×. These are places where housing looks like a bargain from the outside and functions like a squeeze from the inside, because the local labor market fell further than the housing stock did.
Run it the other way and the same logic produces the opposite surprise.
Los Alamos County, New Mexico has a median home value of $593,582 — genuinely expensive, roughly two and a half times the national county median. But median household income there is $147,139, among the highest in the country, because a large share of the county works at the national laboratory. The ratio is 4.0×: above comfortable, but better than Owsley County by a wide margin, on a house worth four times as much.
Stafford County, Virginia tells a similar story at $547,004 and $137,807, also 4.0×. So do Delaware County, Ohio (3.9×) and Calvert County, Maryland (3.7×). These are places where prices climbed but wages climbed with them, which is what a functioning local market is supposed to look like and increasingly doesn't.
At the far end of the distribution, the pattern gets very clean:
Pitkin County, Colorado — Aspen — at 25.7×. Nantucket County, Massachusetts at 22.7×. San Miguel County, Colorado, which contains Telluride, at 20.2×. Teton County, Wyoming, which contains Jackson Hole, at 17.8×. Dukes County, Massachusetts, which is Martha's Vineyard, at 12.4×.
What these have in common isn't that local people earn badly. Pitkin County's median household income is $102,645, well above the national figure. It's that home prices there are set by buyers whose income comes from somewhere else entirely. When a housing market is priced by people who don't work in it, the ratio between local wages and local homes stops describing anything a local person can act on.
A few things worth being clear about, because a single ratio invites more confidence than it has earned.
It ignores interest rates, property taxes, and insurance — all of which vary enormously by state and can matter more than the purchase price. A 4× county with high property taxes and expensive insurance may be a worse deal than a 5× county without them.
It uses medians on both sides, which conceals distribution. A county where half the homes are mansions and half are trailers produces the same median as a county of identical middle-class houses, and they are not the same place to try to buy in.
Census income figures are five-year estimates with margins of error that widen in small counties, exactly the places where the most extreme ratios show up. Owsley County has fewer than 5,000 residents. The direction of that finding is solid; the second decimal place is not.
And it says nothing about whether a place is somewhere you'd want to live. Low ratios cluster in areas with weak job markets and shrinking populations, and that's not a coincidence — it's most of the explanation. Affordability is a constraint, not a recommendation.
The headline number in most housing coverage is a national median home price, which describes almost nobody's actual situation. The next level down is usually a price map, which is better but still answers the wrong question for someone deciding where to live. "What do homes cost here" and "could someone with a normal job here buy one" produce genuinely different maps, and the second one is the question most people are really asking.
You can check any county or city yourself on the county map or the city map — click any area and the price-to-income ratio is in the panel alongside the price. The state pages rank every county within a state by affordability rather than price, which is where the reordering is easiest to see.
Home values from Zillow Research (ZHVI), refreshed daily. Household income from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, table B19013. Figures current as of the most recent releases of both. Full sourcing and known limitations are on the Data & Methodology page. Connecticut is excluded from income comparisons because it replaced its counties with planning regions for Census purposes in 2022, and the two geographies no longer align.