Cost of Living
per year
per month
How Sugar Land's prices compare to the US city average across major spending categories.
How far does your salary go in Sugar Land?
Your $100,000 in Sugar Land has the same purchasing power as $98,174 in the average US city. You'd need $1,826 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 Sugar Land's cost index of 102, sorted by closest match.
Sugar Land has a handful of real selling points, and they're not the kind of thing you find in a brochure. Texas doesn't tax your paycheck and a high-income city, even by us standards are the headliners, plus 2 more things worth knowing. The rest is below.
Living in Sugar Land means no state income tax on your salary — Texas 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.
Sugar Land's typical household earns $132,247, 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 Sugar Land runs about 1,715 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.
Sugar Land has a college-educated share of about 61% 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 Sugar Land'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 Sugar Land run about 46°F — cold-snap mornings happen, real snowfall doesn't, except maybe once a decade.
Not very. Average winter temperatures of about 46°F mean Sugar Land skips the harsh-winter problem most of the country has. A handful of cold mornings, otherwise sweater weather at worst.
Properly hot. Sugar Land's summer averages around 94°F with daily highs that routinely break 100°F. The trick to summer here is starting the day at sunrise and staying inside through the worst of it.
Sugar Land 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.
Around 82 feet (25 m) above sea level — flat enough that nothing about Sugar Land's altitude shows up in daily life.
Hurricane season covers June through November, with peak activity in late summer and early fall. For Sugar Land, the practical advice is: have a few days of water and supplies on hand from August onward, know your evacuation route, and don't wait for the news to tell you a storm is "probably nothing" — track the cone yourself.
The headline number is reassuring. Sugar Land's reported incident rate of about 1,715 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. Sugar Land's index of 102 sits within a few points of the national average — your money buys roughly what it would in a typical American metro.
Sugar Land scores 44 out of 100 on Walk Score, which translates to "car-dependent but not aggressively so". 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 $71,302 to live in Sugar Land 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 Sugar Land runs about $1,868/mo — keeping housing under 30% of gross income points to a similar floor on what you'd want to earn.