Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Gardena's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Gardena?
Your $100,000 in Gardena has the same purchasing power as $73,703 in the average US city. You'd need $26,297 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 Gardena's cost index of 136, sorted by closest match.
Gardena has a handful of real selling points, and they're not the kind of thing you find in a brochure. Solidly above-average earnings and genuinely walkable, not just walkable-on-paper are the headliners. The rest is below.
The typical household in Gardena pulls in $75,443 — comfortably above the US median. Combined with the cost of living here, the income-to-expense ratio works out better than a quick look at either number in isolation would suggest.
With a Walk Score of 86/100, Gardena 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.
Reasons are pulled from Gardena'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.
It's rare. Winters in Gardena run about 50°F — cold-snap mornings happen, real snowfall doesn't, except maybe once a decade.
Not very. Average winter temperatures of about 50°F mean Gardena skips the harsh-winter problem most of the country has. A handful of cold mornings, otherwise sweater weather at worst.
Warm without being brutal. Summer in Gardena sits about 75°F on average. Afternoons can push into the high 80s, but mornings and evenings are usually genuinely pleasant.
Gardena falls in roughly USDA Zone 10. 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 59 feet (18 m) above sea level — flat enough that nothing about Gardena's altitude shows up in daily life.
Middle of the pack. Gardena comes in around 3,825 per 100,000, basically the national average. The interesting question is usually which neighborhood, not which city — that's where the real variation lives.
Significantly. Gardena's index of 136 puts it in the top tier of US cities for cost of living — roughly 36% above the national baseline. The pattern is familiar: housing eats a large share of incomes, and people earning median-equivalent jobs from cheaper metros feel the difference fast.
Gardena scores 86/100 on Walk Score, putting it in the "very walkable" tier. Transit Score is 41 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 $94,976 to live in Gardena 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 Gardena runs about $1,638/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.