Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Gilroy's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Gilroy?
Your $100,000 in Gilroy has the same purchasing power as $67,755 in the average US city. You'd need $32,245 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 Gilroy's cost index of 148, sorted by closest match.
Gilroy 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 a genuinely mild climate are the headliners, plus 3 more things worth knowing. The rest is below.
Gilroy's typical household earns $127,391, 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.
Gilroy's climate sits in the rare US sweet spot — summer averages around 80°F, winter averages around 42°F. You get four seasons without paying the heating bills of the Upper Midwest or the AC bills of the Sun Belt.
Reported crime in Gilroy comes in around 2,718 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.
Bike Score of 61/100 in Gilroy. 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.
Average AQI in Gilroy comes in around 34, 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 Gilroy'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 42°F, Gilroy 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 Gilroy sit around 42°F — sweater-and-jacket weather most days, with the occasional cold front that reminds you it's still winter.
Reliably warm. Gilroy's summer averages around 80°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.
Gilroy 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 213 feet (65 m) above sea level — flat enough that nothing about Gilroy's altitude shows up in daily life.
Middle of the pack. Gilroy comes in around 2,718 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. Gilroy's index of 148 puts it in the top tier of US cities for cost of living — roughly 48% 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.
Gilroy scores 41 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 $103,313 to live in Gilroy 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 Gilroy runs about $2,245/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.