Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Fort Worth's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Fort Worth?
Your $100,000 in Fort Worth has the same purchasing power as $94,349 in the average US city. You'd need $5,651 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 Fort Worth's cost index of 106, sorted by closest match.
These are the reasons people actually move to Fort Worth, ordered roughly by what shows up loudest in the data. Wage income stays untaxed at the state level and most daily life happens on foot lead, plus 1 more things worth knowing — the rest unpacked below.
Wage income in Fort Worth isn't taxed at the state level. Texas is one of the few US states with no income tax, which is one of the reasons people relocating from high-tax states tend to land here in the first place.
With a Walk Score of 82/100, Fort Worth 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.
Bike Score of 70/100 in Fort Worth. That puts it in the small group of US cities where you can do groceries, commute, and run errands on a bike without it being a feat of urban survival.
Reasons are pulled from Fort Worth'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 37°F, Fort Worth 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 Fort Worth sit around 37°F — sweater-and-jacket weather most days, with the occasional cold front that reminds you it's still winter.
Properly hot. Fort Worth's summer averages around 94°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.
Zone 9, give or take a half-zone. Fort Worth's typical winter low puts it in that band on the USDA Hardiness map, which is what nurseries label plants against. Use Zone 9 as your starting filter; the USDA's interactive map is more precise for borderline cases.
Roughly 561 feet (171 m). That's modest elevation — comparable to most inland-Midwest and Southern cities.
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 Fort Worth 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. Fort Worth comes in around 3,283 per 100,000, basically the national average. The interesting question is usually which neighborhood, not which city — that's where the real variation lives.
It's a middle-of-the-road US city on cost. Fort Worth's index of 106 sits within a few points of the national average — your money buys roughly what it would in a typical American metro.
Fort Worth scores 82/100 on Walk Score, putting it in the "very walkable" tier. Transit Score is 35 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 $74,193 to live in Fort Worth 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 Fort Worth runs about $1,313/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.