Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Hawthorne's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Hawthorne?
Your $100,000 in Hawthorne has the same purchasing power as $73,697 in the average US city. You'd need $26,303 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 Hawthorne's cost index of 136, sorted by closest match.
Hawthorne has a handful of real selling points, and they're not the kind of thing you find in a brochure. Safer than the typical US city and genuinely walkable, not just walkable-on-paper are the headliners, plus 1 more things worth knowing. The rest is below.
Reported crime in Hawthorne comes in around 2,872 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.
With a Walk Score of 89/100, Hawthorne 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 61/100 in Hawthorne. 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 Hawthorne'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 Hawthorne 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 Hawthorne 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 Hawthorne sits about 75°F on average. Afternoons can push into the high 80s, but mornings and evenings are usually genuinely pleasant.
Hawthorne 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 79 feet (24 m) above sea level — flat enough that nothing about Hawthorne's altitude shows up in daily life.
Middle of the pack. Hawthorne comes in around 2,872 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. Hawthorne'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.
Hawthorne scores 89/100 on Walk Score, putting it in the "very walkable" tier. Transit Score is 40 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 $94,983 to live in Hawthorne 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 Hawthorne runs about $1,641/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.