The counties where owning a home costs too much

About 22.9 percent of American homeowners with a mortgage spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. 30% of income is considered the federal threshold for being cost burdened. In Queens County, New York, 37.6 percent are cost burdened. In Monongalia County, West Virginia, 12.0 percent are cost burdened.

Four of the five boroughs on the list

Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island all appear on the list, along with Rockland and Nassau counties in the suburbs and Passaic and Hudson counties across the river in New Jersey. Only Manhattan is missing, and that is because so few of Manhattan residents own property and most are renters.

These are not places where people bought recently at high rates. They are places where longtime owners hold houses whose costs, property taxes, insurance, and utilities included, have outrun local incomes. The cost-burden measure counts the full monthly outlay, not just the mortgage payment, so a paid-down loan in a high-tax county still produces a burdened household.

Florida is on the list through high insurance rates. Broward and Miami-Dade both exceed 35 percent, and Florida homeowners have faced some of the steepest property insurance increases in the country. Los Angeles County, at 34.8 percent and 9.8 million residents, has more cost-burdened homeowners in absolute numbers than most states have households.

Renters have it worse everywhere

The national rent-burden figure is 47.4 percent, more than double the owner-burden figure. Nearly half of American renters spend more than 30 percent of income on housing, against fewer than 25% of mortgage holders.

The two lists also point at different places. The most rent-burdened counties are Osceola County, Florida at 62.0 percent, Broward at 61.9, Miami-Dade at 60.9, St. Lucie County at 59.5, and Clayton County, Georgia at 59.4. Central Florida dominates a list that New York dominates on the owner side.

A fixed-rate mortgage locks the largest component of a homeowner's payment for thirty years, so inflation erodes it. Rent resets annually at market rates. So a person who locked in a 30-year mortgage 20 years ago at $2,000 a month is still paying roughly $2,000 a month 20 years later. While an apartment that went for $1,000 a month 20 years can now be over $3,000 a month with market rates increasing. The most rent-burdened counties are ones where rents rose fastest against local wages, which is a different question from where housing costs are highest overall. Rent burden by city is covered in the most rent-burdened cities in America.

The least cost-burdened owner counties are all in the interior: Monongalia County, West Virginia at 12.0 percent, then Morgan County, Alabama, Craighead County, Arkansas, Hendricks County, Indiana, and Benton County, Arkansas, all near 13.6 to 13.9 percent. Home prices in those counties sit low enough relative to incomes that a mortgage consumes a modest share of a paycheck.

The share of households that own at all is a separate measure, covered in the cities where most people rent, and quarterly national homeownership figures are in homeownership and vacancy.

Sources

Figures are from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 2020-2024 5-year estimates. Owner cost burden is from table B25091, covering owner-occupied units with a mortgage whose monthly owner costs exceed 30 percent of household income; monthly owner costs include mortgage payments, property taxes, insurance, utilities, and condominium or association fees. Rent burden is from table B25070, covering gross rent above 30 percent of income. Counties shown have at least 100,000 residents. National figures are population-weighted averages across states.