Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Lafayette's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Lafayette?
Your $100,000 in Lafayette has the same purchasing power as $114,103 in the average US city. You'd need $14,103 less 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 Lafayette's cost index of 88, sorted by closest match.
These are the reasons people actually move to Lafayette, ordered roughly by what shows up loudest in the data. Living costs come in under the US baseline and on the calmer side of the national distribution lead, plus 2 more things worth knowing — the rest unpacked below.
The composite cost-of-living index lands at 88, a comfortable 12% under the US norm. It shows up most clearly in housing, which is where the gap to coastal metros usually opens up. Median rent in town runs about $976/mo against a typical household income of $50,674, which is the kind of ratio that leaves room to save.
Reported crime in Lafayette comes in around 2,834 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.
Average AQI in Lafayette comes in around 40, 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.
Average commute time in Lafayette runs around 16 minutes one-way — short enough that it doesn't restructure your day. Compared to the 45-plus-minute commutes that are normal in major metros, the difference adds up to a real lifestyle gap.
Reasons are pulled from Lafayette'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.
Lafayette does winter the real way. Averages around 21°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. Lafayette's winter sits around 21°F on average — and that's the average, meaning plenty of nights drop well below zero. People here own gear.
Reliably warm. Lafayette'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. Lafayette'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 679 feet (207 m). That's modest elevation — comparable to most inland-Midwest and Southern cities.
Middle of the pack. Lafayette comes in around 2,834 per 100,000, basically the national average. The interesting question is usually which neighborhood, not which city — that's where the real variation lives.
Lafayette is a genuinely affordable city by US standards. The composite index sits at 88 versus the 100 national baseline — about 12% cheaper overall, with housing doing most of the heavy lifting.
Lafayette scores 29 out of 100 on Walk Score, which translates to "car-dependent but not aggressively so". Transit Score is 34 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 $61,348 to live in Lafayette 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 Lafayette runs about $976/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.