Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Cary's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Cary?
Your $100,000 in Cary has the same purchasing power as $99,890 in the average US city.
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 Cary's cost index of 100, sorted by closest match.
Cary has a handful of real selling points, and they're not the kind of thing you find in a brochure. A high-income city, even by US standards and the labor market runs tight are the headliners, plus 4 more things worth knowing. The rest is below.
Cary's typical household earns $125,317, which puts it in the top tier of US cities for household income. The bottom of the wage distribution isn't necessarily different from anywhere else, but the median and above sit meaningfully higher.
The unemployment rate in Cary sits at roughly 3.4%, which is a tight labor market by US standards. Salaries get nudged up faster, openings are easier to find, and switching jobs is less of a leap than it is in a softer market.
The reported crime rate in Cary runs about 1,193 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.
Average AQI in Cary comes in around 41, 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.
Average commute time in Cary runs around 23 minutes one-way — short enough that it doesn't restructure your day. Compared to the 45-plus-minute commutes that are normal in major metros, the difference adds up to a real lifestyle gap.
Cary has a college-educated share of about 70% among adults 25+, which is higher than the national norm. It shows up in the local job mix, in the school district's reputation, and in the kind of conversations you have at the coffee shop.
Reasons are pulled from Cary'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.
Cary gets a handful of meaningful snow days each year. Winters average about 33°F — cold enough for several inches at a time, warm enough for everything to melt between storms.
A real winter, but not a punishing one. Cary averages roughly 33°F in winter, with the coldest mornings dipping into the single digits a few times a year and most days landing somewhere between "chilly" and "actually cold".
Reliably warm. Cary's summer averages around 89°F, the kind of heat where you remember to leave the house before noon for outdoor things and accept that the back of your shirt will be wet by lunchtime.
Cary falls in roughly USDA Zone 8. The zone classification is based on average annual minimum temperatures, so it's the right lookup for whether perennials and trees will overwinter here. Note that this is approximate from our winter-temperature data — check the USDA map for the exact zone before betting an expensive plant on it.
Around 400 feet (122 m) above sea level — flat enough that nothing about Cary's altitude shows up in daily life.
Hurricane season covers June through November, with peak activity in late summer and early fall. For Cary, the practical advice is: have a few days of water and supplies on hand from August onward, know your evacuation route, and don't wait for the news to tell you a storm is "probably nothing" — track the cone yourself.
The headline number is reassuring. Cary's reported incident rate of about 1,193 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. Cary's index of 100 sits within a few points of the national average — your money buys roughly what it would in a typical American metro.
Cary scores 27 out of 100 on Walk Score, which translates to "car-dependent but not aggressively so". Transit Score is 26 out of 100. Some neighborhoods buck the citywide average; the dense inner cores are usually noticeably more walkable than the city number suggests.
As a rule of thumb, plan on about $70,077 to live in Cary 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 Cary runs about $1,538/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.