Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Elk Grove's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Elk Grove?
Your $100,000 in Elk Grove has the same purchasing power as $83,675 in the average US city. You'd need $16,325 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 Elk Grove's cost index of 120, sorted by closest match.
Elk Grove 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 crime statistics come out reassuring are the headliners, plus 1 more things worth knowing. The rest is below.
Elk Grove's typical household earns $115,864, 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 reported crime rate in Elk Grove runs about 1,547 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 citywide Walk Score of 59/100, Elk Grove sits firmly in the walkable-by-US-standards camp. Pick a central neighborhood and most daily errands happen without keys in your hand.
Reasons are pulled from Elk Grove'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.
Not really a snow town. With winters averaging 40°F, Elk Grove sits in the mild-cold band where snowflakes appear occasionally and everything melts within a day. Most years see one storm worth talking about.
Cool, not cold. Winters in Elk Grove sit around 40°F — sweater-and-jacket weather most days, with the occasional cold front that reminds you it's still winter.
Properly hot. Elk Grove's summer averages around 91°F with daily highs that routinely break 100°F. The trick to summer here is starting the day at sunrise and staying inside through the worst of it.
Elk Grove falls in roughly USDA Zone 9. 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 43 feet (13 m) above sea level — flat enough that nothing about Elk Grove's altitude shows up in daily life.
The headline number is reassuring. Elk Grove's reported incident rate of about 1,547 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.
More expensive than average — by enough to plan around. Elk Grove's composite index is 120 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.
In parts, yes. With a citywide Walk Score of 59/100, Elk Grove has genuinely walkable neighborhoods alongside more sprawled stretches. If walkability matters to you, the neighborhood choice will matter more than the city-level number.
As a rule of thumb, plan on about $83,657 to live in Elk Grove 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 Elk Grove runs about $2,076/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.