Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Gary's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Gary?
Your $100,000 in Gary has the same purchasing power as $96,787 in the average US city. You'd need $3,213 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 Gary's cost index of 103, sorted by closest match.
Why do people move to Gary? On the data, the answer is largely on the calmer side of the national distribution. The detail is below.
Reported crime in Gary comes in around 2,894 per 100,000 — under the national baseline of about 3,500. Worth digging into specific neighborhoods before settling on one, but the city-level picture is on the safer side.
Reasons are pulled from Gary'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.
Gary does winter the real way. Averages around 22°F keep snow on the ground for weeks at a time, and lakes and rivers tend to freeze hard enough to walk on.
Properly cold. Gary's winter sits around 22°F on average — and that's the average, meaning plenty of nights drop well below zero. People here own gear.
Reliably warm. Gary's summer averages around 82°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 7, give or take a half-zone. Gary's typical winter low puts it in that band on the USDA Hardiness map, which is what nurseries label plants against. Use Zone 7 as your starting filter; the USDA's interactive map is more precise for borderline cases.
Roughly 600 feet (183 m). That's modest elevation — comparable to most inland-Midwest and Southern cities.
Middle of the pack. Gary comes in around 2,894 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. Gary's index of 103 sits within a few points of the national average — your money buys roughly what it would in a typical American metro.
Gary scores 47 out of 100 on Walk Score, which translates to "car-dependent but not aggressively so". 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 $72,324 to live in Gary 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 Gary runs about $929/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.