Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Lacey's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Lacey?
Your $100,000 in Lacey has the same purchasing power as $92,713 in the average US city. You'd need $7,287 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 Lacey's cost index of 108, sorted by closest match.
So why do people move to Lacey? The honest answer involves a few specific things the data backs up — most clearly no state income tax and paychecks come in above the us average, plus 1 more things worth knowing. The detail on each one is below.
Washington is one of the handful of US states with no state income tax on wages, so the only income-tax bite on a paycheck in Lacey is federal. For a household earning $100k, that's a tangible four-figure difference every year compared to a comparable salary in California or New York. (Washington taxes some long-term capital gains over a high threshold, but ordinary wages and salaries are not taxed.)
The typical household in Lacey pulls in $79,874 — 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.
Bike Score of 66/100 in Lacey. 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 Lacey'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 38°F, Lacey 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 Lacey sit around 38°F — sweater-and-jacket weather most days, with the occasional cold front that reminds you it's still winter.
Warm without being brutal. Summer in Lacey sits about 75°F on average. Afternoons can push into the high 80s, but mornings and evenings are usually genuinely pleasant.
Approximately USDA Hardiness Zone 9. That's the band gardeners use to pick plants — anything rated for Zone 9 or colder should survive a typical winter in Lacey. (The estimate is derived from our winter-temperature data; the official USDA map uses station-level annual minimums and may differ by half a zone.)
Around 184 feet (56 m) above sea level — flat enough that nothing about Lacey's altitude shows up in daily life.
Middle of the pack. Lacey comes in around 3,702 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. Lacey's index of 108 sits within a few points of the national average — your money buys roughly what it would in a typical American metro.
Lacey scores 42 out of 100 on Walk Score, which translates to "car-dependent but not aggressively so". Transit Score is 40 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 $75,502 to live in Lacey 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 Lacey runs about $1,639/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.