Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Elizabeth's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Elizabeth?
Your $100,000 in Elizabeth has the same purchasing power as $80,308 in the average US city. You'd need $19,692 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 Elizabeth's cost index of 125, sorted by closest match.
Why do people move to Elizabeth? On the data, the answer is largely clean air, by the numbers. The detail is below.
Average AQI in Elizabeth 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.
Reasons are pulled from Elizabeth'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.
Snow is a regular feature, not a surprise. With winter temperatures hovering near 28°F, Elizabeth sees enough snowfall that locals don't think twice about it but also enough mild stretches that nobody owns three pairs of boots.
A real winter, but not a punishing one. Elizabeth averages roughly 28°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. Elizabeth's summer averages around 84°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.
Zone 8, give or take a half-zone. Elizabeth's typical winter low puts it in that band on the USDA Hardiness map, which is what nurseries label plants against. Use Zone 8 as your starting filter; the USDA's interactive map is more precise for borderline cases.
Barely above the water. Elizabeth is at about 20 feet (6 m) elevation, and parts of the city are essentially at sea level. Flood-zone maps are worth checking before buying a house.
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 Elizabeth 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.
Middle of the pack. Elizabeth comes in around 3,040 per 100,000, basically the national average. The interesting question is usually which neighborhood, not which city — that's where the real variation lives.
More expensive than average — by enough to plan around. Elizabeth's composite index is 125 versus 100 for the US, with rent and home prices driving most of the gap. Salaries in higher-paying industries usually move together, but the math still tightens for everyone else.
Elizabeth scores 32 out of 100 on Walk Score, which translates to "car-dependent but not aggressively so". Transit Score is 41 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 $87,164 to live in Elizabeth 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 Elizabeth runs about $1,390/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.