Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Santa Clarita's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Santa Clarita?
Your $100,000 in Santa Clarita has the same purchasing power as $72,812 in the average US city. You'd need $27,188 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 Santa Clarita's cost index of 137, sorted by closest match.
Santa Clarita has a handful of real selling points, and they're not the kind of thing you find in a brochure. A high-income city, even by US standards and crime statistics come out reassuring are the headliners, plus 3 more things worth knowing. The rest is below.
Santa Clarita's typical household earns $116,186, 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 reported crime rate in Santa Clarita runs about 1,260 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.
Bike Score of 62/100 in Santa Clarita. 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.
Average AQI in Santa Clarita 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.
Santa Clarita has a college-educated share of about 39% 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 Santa Clarita'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.
It's rare. Winters in Santa Clarita run about 50°F — cold-snap mornings happen, real snowfall doesn't, except maybe once a decade.
Not very. Average winter temperatures of about 50°F mean Santa Clarita skips the harsh-winter problem most of the country has. A handful of cold mornings, otherwise sweater weather at worst.
Warm without being brutal. Summer in Santa Clarita sits about 75°F on average. Afternoons can push into the high 80s, but mornings and evenings are usually genuinely pleasant.
Santa Clarita falls in roughly USDA Zone 10. 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 1,312 feet (400 m). That's modest elevation — comparable to most inland-Midwest and Southern cities.
The headline number is reassuring. Santa Clarita's reported incident rate of about 1,260 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.
Significantly. Santa Clarita's index of 137 puts it in the top tier of US cities for cost of living — roughly 37% above the national baseline. The pattern is familiar: housing eats a large share of incomes, and people earning median-equivalent jobs from cheaper metros feel the difference fast.
In parts, yes. With a citywide Walk Score of 51/100, Santa Clarita 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 $96,138 to live in Santa Clarita 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 Santa Clarita runs about $2,315/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.