Most expensive metro
#1 / 87
New York-Newark-Jersey City — composite index 187.4 (national average = 100).
The City Cost Index · A Moronacity Original Dataset
What it actually costs to live in 87 American cities — refreshed every Tuesday, audited every quarter.
A weekly dataset of rent, groceries, and transit across every U.S. metro above 250,000 people — built by our data desk because the other indices stopped being honest about housing in 2019.
This Week, By The Numbers
Live readings from the dataset, pulled this morning.
Every number below comes straight from our 87-metro panel and is reproducible from the public methodology. If a figure looks wrong, it probably is — email us and we will rerun it.
Least expensive metro
#87 / 87
Memphis, TN-MS-AR — composite index 84.6. Lowest in groceries; mid-pack on transit.
Median rent delta, YoY
+2.1%
A cooling print after 31 consecutive months above 3%. Sun Belt metros still above 5%.
Grocery inflation, basket-weighted
+3.8%
Largest contributor: eggs (+18.4% YoY). Smallest: rice (-2.1%). Ref basket of 38 staples.
Last refresh: Tuesday, March 11 · 06:00 ET · 412,000 readers get the weekly note in their inbox.
How the Index Is Built
A methodology that survives an angry email from a city economist.
Data sources, named plainly.
Rent comes from Zillow's Observed Rent Index (ZORI), cross-checked against Apartment List's monthly report. We use ZORI as the spine and treat Apartment List as a triangulation layer — when the two diverge by more than 4%, we publish the gap and pick the median.
Groceries are built from a 38-item reference basket priced weekly across 14 chains and 9 regional grocers, weighted by BLS consumption shares. We don't use CPI-U directly because it lags the shelf by two months.
Transit pulls from each metro's published agency fare schedules and includes a single-ride, a 30-day pass, and the average cost of a 5-mile ride-hail trip. Monthly passes are weighted at 40 trips; ride-hail is weighted at 2 trips per month per rider.
Weighting, refresh cadence, and what we hide.
The composite is weighted 55% rent, 25% groceries, 20% transit. The weights are not negotiable — they reflect where Americans actually feel the squeeze, per the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey.
The index refreshes every Tuesday at 06:00 ET. The full CSV drops at the same time. We publish a changelog of every revision, including which metros got re-baselined and why.
What we don't do: we don't include utilities (too volatile, too noisy), we don't include childcare (a separate index lives at Care Index), and we don't include taxes. Each omission is a deliberate choice, and we publish the rationale in the methodology PDF.
The consumer-facing layer
Plan the move. Skip the regret.
The Rent vs. Regret calculator turns the index into the question every reader is actually asking: if I move from here to there, what does my life cost — and what do I gain or lose that doesn't show up on a spreadsheet?
- Side-by-side metros. Compare any two of 87 cities on rent, groceries, and transit in one view.
- Salary adjuster. We re-weight for cost-of-living, state income tax, and the median rent-to-income ratio in each destination.
- Non-monetary deltas. Walk score, transit coverage, average commute, and three culture indicators pulled from our Culture desk.
- Exportable plan. Take the comparison as a PDF or share it as a private link — used by 240,000+ readers since launch.
Cited and used by
- The Atlantic
- NPR Planet Money
- Bloomberg
- The New York Times
- Reuters
- The Guardian
A note from the editor
“We built our own index because the ones on the market kept telling us rent was a normal line item. It isn't. Housing is the bill that decides whether everything else in your city life works — and the public numbers stopped modeling that honestly somewhere around 2019. So we built one that does.”
Stay current on what the index is showing
Every Tuesday, the index changes. Every Wednesday, we tell you why.
The Daily Dish is our flagship weekly note — the rent shifts, transit hikes, and grocery spikes the index is surfacing, explained by the reporters who built the dataset. 412,000 readers. 38% average open rate. Free.