Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Dundalk's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Dundalk?
Your $100,000 in Dundalk has the same purchasing power as $91,937 in the average US city. You'd need $8,063 more 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 Dundalk's cost index of 109, sorted by closest match.
So why do people move to Dundalk? The honest answer involves a few specific things the data backs up — most clearly it's a quieter city by the numbers and you don't actually need a car, plus 1 more things worth knowing. The detail on each one is below.
The reported crime rate in Dundalk runs about -24 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 82/100, Dundalk 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 Dundalk comes in around 37, 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 Dundalk'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.
Yes, several times a winter. Dundalk's winter average of about 27°F sits right around freezing, so storms typically drop real snow that lingers a few days before slush sets in.
A real winter, but not a punishing one. Dundalk averages roughly 27°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. Dundalk's summer averages around 87°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.
Approximately USDA Hardiness Zone 8. That's the band gardeners use to pick plants — anything rated for Zone 8 or colder should survive a typical winter in Dundalk. (The estimate is derived from our winter-temperature data; the official USDA map uses station-level annual minimums and may differ by half a zone.)
Around 23 feet (7 m) above sea level — flat enough that nothing about Dundalk's altitude shows up in daily life.
Officially, Atlantic hurricane season runs June 1 through November 30, but most of the action lands between mid-August and mid-October. For Dundalk, that's when to keep half an eye on the National Hurricane Center forecast cone — and when an actual evacuation plan is worth having in the drawer if you're in a low-lying or coastal neighborhood.
The headline number is reassuring. Dundalk's reported incident rate of about -24 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. Dundalk's index of 109 sits within a few points of the national average — your money buys roughly what it would in a typical American metro.
Dundalk scores 82/100 on Walk Score, putting it in the "very walkable" tier. Transit Score is 30 out of 100. 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 $76,139 to live in Dundalk 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 Dundalk runs about $1,346/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.