Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Bristol's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Bristol?
Your $100,000 in Bristol has the same purchasing power as $104,091 in the average US city. You'd need $4,091 less here to maintain that standard of living.
Demographics and workforce data from the US Census ACS 5-Year.
bachelor's or higher
Climate, safety, and walkability indicators.
See a side-by-side breakdown of cost of living, housing, and salaries.
Popular comparisons
Sorted by affordability — most affordable first.
Within 10 points of Bristol's cost index of 96, sorted by closest match.
These are the reasons people actually move to Bristol, ordered roughly by what shows up loudest in the data. Where the city quietly wins: housing costs and a higher-income labor market than the national norm lead, plus 3 more things worth knowing — the rest unpacked below.
Median rent is about $1,228/mo, and the housing sub-index lands at 80 (US avg = 100) in Bristol. That's the line item people from coastal metros usually find hardest to believe — and the one that frees up budget for everything else.
The typical household in Bristol pulls in $82,094 — comfortably above the US median. Combined with the cost of living here, the income-to-expense ratio works out better than a quick look at either number in isolation would suggest.
The reported crime rate in Bristol runs about 1,391 per 100,000 residents — meaningfully below the national norm. People who care about safety as a baseline rather than a feature tend to land in cities with numbers like these.
With a Walk Score of 83/100, Bristol is in the category where car ownership becomes a real choice rather than the default. Errands work on foot, the city's built dense enough that things are actually close together, and the parking-and-gas budget can quietly disappear.
Average AQI in Bristol comes in around 38, well into the "good" band. Clean air isn't a thing you appreciate until you've lived somewhere it wasn't — and this is the side of that line you want to be on.
Reasons are pulled from Bristol's actual data — Census ACS, BLS, BEA, NOAA, EPA AQS, FBI, and Walk Score. We don't list positives that aren't supported by the numbers, which is why different cities show different sections.
Bristol does winter the real way. Averages around 20°F keep snow on the ground for weeks at a time, and lakes and rivers tend to freeze hard enough to walk on.
Properly cold. Bristol's winter sits around 20°F on average — and that's the average, meaning plenty of nights drop well below zero. People here own gear.
Warm without being brutal. Summer in Bristol sits about 77°F on average. Afternoons can push into the high 80s, but mornings and evenings are usually genuinely pleasant.
Zone 7, give or take a half-zone. Bristol's typical winter low puts it in that band on the USDA Hardiness map, which is what nurseries label plants against. Use Zone 7 as your starting filter; the USDA's interactive map is more precise for borderline cases.
Around 413 feet (126 m) above sea level — flat enough that nothing about Bristol's altitude shows up in daily life.
Atlantic basin storms can form from June 1 to November 30, but the serious ones cluster in August, September, and the first half of October. Residents of Bristol learn the season's rhythm fast: watch the cone, board up when it's the call, and don't shrug off the slow-mover storms — those are usually the ones that flood.
The headline number is reassuring. Bristol's reported incident rate of about 1,391 per 100,000 is comfortably below the US norm of around 3,500 per 100k. Specific neighborhoods always vary, but the broader picture is on the safer side.
It's a middle-of-the-road US city on cost. Bristol's index of 96 sits within a few points of the national average — your money buys roughly what it would in a typical American metro.
Bristol scores 83/100 on Walk Score, putting it in the "very walkable" tier. It's the kind of city where you don't think of going to the grocery store as "going" to the grocery store.
As a rule of thumb, plan on about $67,249 to live in Bristol the way a $70,000 earner lives in a typical US city. The math gets less forgiving the lower you go below that. Median rent in Bristol runs about $1,228/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.