Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Sammamish's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Sammamish?
Your $100,000 in Sammamish has the same purchasing power as $79,214 in the average US city. You'd need $20,786 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 Sammamish's cost index of 126, sorted by closest match.
Sammamish has a handful of real selling points, and they're not the kind of thing you find in a brochure. Washington doesn't tax your paycheck and a high-income city, even by us standards are the headliners, plus 3 more things worth knowing. The rest is below.
Living in Sammamish means no state income tax on your salary — Washington is one of nine states that simply doesn't have one. On a $100k income that's typically thousands of dollars a year that stay in your account instead of going to a state revenue department. (Washington taxes some long-term capital gains over a high threshold, but ordinary wages and salaries are not taxed.)
Sammamish's typical household earns $215,047, 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.
The unemployment rate in Sammamish sits at roughly 2.8%, which is a tight labor market by US standards. Salaries get nudged up faster, openings are easier to find, and switching jobs is less of a leap than it is in a softer market.
The reported crime rate in Sammamish runs about 984 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.
Sammamish has a college-educated share of about 76% 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 Sammamish'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, Sammamish 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 Sammamish 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 Sammamish sits about 75°F on average. Afternoons can push into the high 80s, but mornings and evenings are usually genuinely pleasant.
Sammamish falls in roughly USDA Zone 9. 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.
Roughly 512 feet (156 m). That's modest elevation — comparable to most inland-Midwest and Southern cities.
The headline number is reassuring. Sammamish's reported incident rate of about 984 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.
More expensive than average — by enough to plan around. Sammamish's composite index is 126 versus 100 for the US, with rent and home prices driving most of the gap. Salaries in higher-paying industries usually move together, but the math still tightens for everyone else.
Sammamish scores 27 out of 100 on Walk Score, which translates to "car-dependent but not aggressively so". Transit Score is 30 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 $88,368 to live in Sammamish 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 Sammamish runs about $2,627/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.