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If you’ve been wondering why a perfectly respectable salary somehow disappears after that pricey rent, groceries, a MetroCard and approximately two dinners out, new data has arrived to make you feel considerably worse.
A single adult now needs to earn $124,342 a year before taxes to live “comfortably” in New York State, according to a new analysis from financial technology company SmartAsset. That makes New York the fourth-most expensive state in the country for a single person, trailing only Hawaii ($129,002), Massachusetts ($127,213) and California ($126,797).
And somehow, that isn’t even the most alarming number. For a family of four (defined as two working adults and two children), SmartAsset calculates that a household needs $291,533 annually to achieve the same level of financial comfort in New York.
Before you start drafting your resignation letter and pricing cabins in West Virginia, there is an important caveat: SmartAsset isn’t saying $124,342 is the bare minimum required to survive here. Its definition of “comfortable” is based on the classic 50/30/20 budgeting rule, in which 50 percent of income covers necessities such as housing and utilities, 30 percent goes toward discretionary spending and 20 percent is reserved for savings, retirement and emergencies. (The figures also represent annual pre-tax income.)
Still, New York’s numbers are moving in an especially unpleasant direction. The salary required for a single adult increased 8.4 percent from last year, the second-largest jump of any state in the country. Only Montana—where the figure rose 8.6 percent—saw a bigger year-over-year increase.
SmartAsset based its calculations on data from MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, using estimates for basic costs for a single adult with no children and a household with two working adults and two children. It then treated those necessary expenses as 50 percent of a total budget to arrive at its “comfortable” salary figure.
For a little perspective, even the cheapest state isn’t exactly cheap anymore. A single adult in West Virginia still needs more than $80,000 to meet SmartAsset’s definition of comfortable living. Nationwide, the study found that a single person now needs at least that income in every state, while the figure tops six figures in nearly half of them.
New York is expensive—we all knew that already. But apparently the price of feeling financially comfortable here is now a six-figure salary and then some.