Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Mount Pleasant's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Mount Pleasant?
Your $100,000 in Mount Pleasant has the same purchasing power as $93,119 in the average US city. You'd need $6,881 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 Mount Pleasant's cost index of 107, sorted by closest match.
These are the reasons people actually move to Mount Pleasant, ordered roughly by what shows up loudest in the data. Above-average earnings, not just for a few people and low unemployment, plenty of openings lead, plus 3 more things worth knowing — the rest unpacked below.
Mount Pleasant's typical household earns $115,167, 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.
At about 3.2% unemployment, Mount Pleasant's labor market is running on the tight side. Easier to land a role, easier to negotiate, easier to leave one job for a better one — the practical things that matter when you're actually looking.
The reported crime rate in Mount Pleasant runs about 1,570 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.
Average AQI in Mount Pleasant comes in around 42, 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.
Mount Pleasant has a college-educated share of about 65% among adults 25+, which is higher than the national norm. It shows up in the local job mix, in the school district's reputation, and in the kind of conversations you have at the coffee shop.
Reasons are pulled from Mount Pleasant'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.
Mount Pleasant 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. Mount Pleasant'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. Mount Pleasant's summer averages around 81°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. Mount Pleasant'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.
Around 26 feet (8 m) above sea level — flat enough that nothing about Mount Pleasant's altitude shows up in daily life.
Atlantic basin storms can form from June 1 to November 30, but the serious ones cluster in August, September, and the first half of October. Residents of Mount Pleasant learn the season's rhythm fast: watch the cone, board up when it's the call, and don't shrug off the slow-mover storms — those are usually the ones that flood.
The headline number is reassuring. Mount Pleasant's reported incident rate of about 1,570 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. Mount Pleasant's index of 107 sits within a few points of the national average — your money buys roughly what it would in a typical American metro.
In parts, yes. With a citywide Walk Score of 50/100, Mount Pleasant has genuinely walkable neighborhoods alongside more sprawled stretches. If walkability matters to you, the neighborhood choice will matter more than the city-level number.
As a rule of thumb, plan on about $75,173 to live in Mount Pleasant 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 Mount Pleasant runs about $1,901/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.