Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Joliet's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Joliet?
Your $100,000 in Joliet has the same purchasing power as $96,108 in the average US city. You'd need $3,892 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 Joliet's cost index of 104, sorted by closest match.
These are the reasons people actually move to Joliet, ordered roughly by what shows up loudest in the data. A higher-income labor market than the national norm and among the safer us cities of its size lead — the rest unpacked below.
The typical household in Joliet pulls in $84,971 — 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.
The reported crime rate in Joliet runs about 1,553 per 100,000 residents — meaningfully below the national norm. People who care about safety as a baseline rather than a feature tend to land in cities with numbers like these.
Reasons are pulled from Joliet'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.
Joliet 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. Joliet'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. Joliet'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. Joliet'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 617 feet (188 m). That's modest elevation — comparable to most inland-Midwest and Southern cities.
The headline number is reassuring. Joliet's reported incident rate of about 1,553 per 100,000 is comfortably below the US norm of around 3,500 per 100k. Specific neighborhoods always vary, but the broader picture is on the safer side.
It's a middle-of-the-road US city on cost. Joliet's index of 104 sits within a few points of the national average — your money buys roughly what it would in a typical American metro.
Joliet scores 43 out of 100 on Walk Score, which translates to "car-dependent but not aggressively so". Transit Score is 29 out of 100. 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 $72,835 to live in Joliet 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 Joliet runs about $1,174/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.