McAllen Is the Most Affordable City We Track (2026)

McAllen leads, and the number backs it up

McAllen's Affordability Score is 74.9, the best mark among the cities we cover across the 100 largest metro areas. That number comes from weighing what a household actually pays for a home, the basics and taxes, against what people there earn, blended into one figure. For McAllen, cheap housing does the heavy lifting. Everyday costs land solid too. Taxes are the one place it slips, middle of the pack rather than a strength, but the housing and everyday numbers carry it to the top.

Little Rock sits right behind at 74.8, close enough that the two towns are basically tied for the title. Little Rock's story is different though. Its everyday costs, groceries, gas, electricity, score even higher than McAllen's. Its housing isn't quite as cheap relative to income, and its taxes come in a touch lower on our scale. Either way, you're looking at a place where the paycheck stretches.

Louisville, Austin, and Cape Coral round out the top five

Louisville comes in third at 74.4. What sets Louisville apart from the two ahead of it is taxes, its tax score of 67.4 is the strongest of anyone in the top five by a wide margin. Housing there is affordable but not as cheap as McAllen's, and everyday costs are solid without being a standout. If low tax bills matter most to you, Louisville is the one worth a longer look.

Austin lands fourth at 73.3, and that's the surprise on this list. Austin has a reputation as an expensive place to live, but the score says otherwise once you weigh housing against local pay. One resident, Nancy Cotton, put it this way, "Because although there is no income tax, property taxes are OUTRAGEOUS." That's the tension baked right into Austin's tax score of 52.9, the weakest of its three components. No income tax sounds great until the property tax bill lands.

Cape Coral rounds out the top five at 71. It's the only one of the five where housing isn't the strongest leg, its housing score of 67.5 is actually the lowest of the top five components. Taxes carry Cape Coral instead, scoring 73, and everyday costs sit in the middle. It's a more balanced profile than the others, no single number doing all the work.

The gap between the top and everywhere else

Here's what the top five don't tell you. Once you leave that group, the numbers drop fast. Oklahoma City at sixth is already almost 3 points behind Cape Coral. By the time you're forty places down, at Boise, the score has fallen to 58.1, more than 16 points off McAllen's mark. Keep going and you hit cities in the 20s and teens, places where housing costs eat far more of what people actually earn.

That drop matters for anyone treating this as a shopping list rather than a leaderboard. A city ranked 30th isn't a minor step down from one ranked 5th, it's often a meaningfully harder budget every single month. If you're comparing options beyond the top five, don't just glance at the rank number. Look at where the score actually sits and ask what group is dragging it down, housing, everyday costs, or taxes, because that's the number you'll feel in your own bank account.

How we got this

The Affordability Score blends three groups of numbers for each city, covering the period 2026. Housing combines typical rent and typical home value, each measured against local median household income, using the Zillow Observed Rent Index, the Zillow Home Value Index, and American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates (2020-2024), Table B19013. Everyday costs combine the BEA's Regional Price Parities for goods at the metro level with state gas prices from AAA or EIA Weekly Retail Gasoline Prices and residential electricity rates from EIA Electricity Data. Taxes combine combined state and local sales tax rates and top state income tax rates from the Tax Foundation with effective property tax rates built from American Community Survey Table B25077 and B25103.

Each of those underlying figures is scored from 0 to 100 against every other city that has it, with a lower cost always scoring higher. A group's score is the average of the figures it has, and the overall Affordability Score is the average of the three group scores. A city missing an entire group is scored on the rest rather than penalized with a fake zero. One quirk worth flagging, Bridgeport's housing score reads 0 because its home value runs to roughly 1,182 percent of median household income, a measurement floor from how home value gets expressed as a multiple of income, not a sign the city lacks housing data. The full list covers 107 cities, the principal city of each of the country's 100 largest metro areas plus every city The Honest Local covers separately, updated monthly with yearly income, price parity, and tax figures refreshed as each agency publishes.