The Bay Area is the number one most expensive city in the U.S. to raise kids in. The personal finance website SmartAsset used data from MIT's Living Wage Calculator to find that in the U.S., it costs close to $21-thousand a year to raise a child.
The site reviewed nearly 400 metro areas across the country to determine how much it costs for two adults to raise a child in 2023. Much of the top 10 most expensive areas were in California. The least expensive were all in the South with Morristown, TN coming in as the cheapest city to raise a child.
Here are the most expensive cities to raise a child:
- San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA
- Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA
- San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA
- Barnstable, MA
- Boston, MA Metro
- Ann Arbor, MI
- Trenton-Princeton, NJ
- Kalamazoo-Portage, MI
- Napa, CA
- Santa Rosa-Petaluma, CA
Here are the top 10 cheapest cities to raise a child:
- Morristown, TN
- Sumter, SC
- Jackson, TN
- Gadsden, AL
- Longview, TX
- Columbia, SC
- Florence, SC
- Dothan, AL
- Hilton Head Island-Bluffton, SC
- Spartanburg, SC
Source: Smart Asset