Most Expensive Places To Live In Pennsylvania For 2020

The 10 Most Expensive Places To Live In Pennsylvania For 2020

1. State College

State College is a home rule municipality in Centre County in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It is the largest designated borough in Pennsylvania. It is the principal borough of the six municipalities that make up the State College Metropolitan Statistical Area, the largest settlement in Centre County and one of the principal cities of the greater State College-DuBois Combined Statistical Area with a combined population of 236,577 as of the 2010 United States Census. In the 2010 census, the borough population was 42,034 with approximately 105,000 living in the borough plus the surrounding townships often referred to locally as the "Centre Region." Many of these Centre Region communities also carry a "State College, PA" address although are not part of the borough of State College.

The median income in State College comes in at $33,244 and the median home value is $299,500 for 2020.

2. West Chester

West Chester is a borough and the county seat of Chester County, Pennsylvania, in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. The population was 18,461 at the 2010 census.

The median income in West Chester comes in at $58,500 and the median home value is $362,300 for 2020.

3. Gettysburg

Gettysburg is a borough and the county seat of Adams County in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. The Battle of Gettysburg and President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address are named for this town. The town hosts visitors to the Gettysburg National Battlefield in the Gettysburg National Military Park. As of the 2010 census, the borough had a population of 7,620 people.

The median income in Gettysburg comes in at $42,562 and the median home value is $232,400 for 2020.

4. Stroudsburg

Stroudsburg is a borough in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is in the state's Poconos region, approximately five miles from the Delaware Water Gap, at the confluence of the Brodhead, McMichaels and Pocono Creeks. It is in northeastern Pennsylvania. It is also the county seat of Monroe County. Stroudsburg is part of the East Stroudsburg, PA Metropolitan Statistical Area, which in turn is part of the New York combined statistical area.

The median income in Stroudsburg comes in at $30,926 and the median home value is $166,500 for 2020.

Bangor is a borough located in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, 32 miles north of Allentown, in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania, United States. It is part of Pennsylvania's Slate Belt. It had a population of 5,273 according to the 2010 census.

The median income in Bangor comes in at $42,717 and the median home value is $156,700 for 2020.

6. Philadelphia

Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the sixth-most populous city in the United States, with an estimated population of 1,567,872 and more than 6million in the seventh-largest metropolitan statistical area, as of 2016. Philadelphia is the economic and cultural anchor of the Delaware Valley region, located along the lower Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. The region's population of 7.2million ranks it as the eighth-largest combined statistical area in the United States.

The median income in Philadelphia comes in at $43,744 and the median home value is $156,800 for 2020.

7. Conshohocken

The median income in Conshohocken comes in at $85,861 and the median home value is $293,400 for 2020.

The median income in Doyle comes in at $77,841 and the median home value is $398,000 for 2020.

9. Bloomsburg

Bloomsburg is a town in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, United States, located 40 miles southwest of Wilkes-Barre along the Susquehanna River. It is the county seat of Columbia County and the only incorporated town in Pennsylvania. As of the 2010 census, Bloomsburg had a population of 14,855, with an estimated population of 14,519 in 2013.

The median income in Bloomsburg comes in at $32,318 and the median home value is $134,900 for 2020.

The median income in Downin comes in at $61,417 and the median home value is $227,000 for 2020.

How We Determined The Most Expensive Places To Live In The Keystone State For 2020

The two most important things to think about when it comes to being able to afford if you can live comes down to:

1. How much do money do I make?
2. How much do I have spend to live there?

You need to understand your costs in the context of how much money you make.

For example, if the median household earns $100,000 and spends $40,000 on housing it's actually cheaper to live there than a place with a median income of $50,000 and housing costs of $21,000. You might spend more on housing, but you have more money overall to play with.

With that example in mind, we derived several statistics from the latest Census American Community Survey 2014-2018 around incomes and costs. They are:

• Median Home Price / Median Income (lower is better)
• Median Income / Median Rent (Higher is better)
• Median Home Price

We added simply median home price because high home prices generally correlate with higher expenses for all costs related to homes (heating, electricity, etc).

You can then compare these metrics in each of the places in Pennsylvania to figure out which is the most expensive.

What you are left with is a "Cost of Living Index" by taking the average rank of each of these metrics for each city.

So we used that cost of living index in order to rank all of the 186 places in Pennsylvania that have more than 5,000 people.

The place with the highest cost of living in Pennsylvania according to the data is State College. You can download the data here.