Most Affordable Housing Markets in 2026

How the Curb Report Affordability Index works

Affordability is one of the most searched and least well-measured ideas in housing. Headlines fixate on the national median home price, but a single national number tells you almost nothing about whether a specific place is within reach for the people who live there. A 400,000 dollar median home is comfortably affordable in a metro where households earn 140,000 dollars, and badly unaffordable in a county where the typical household earns 45,000 dollars. The Curb Report Affordability Index exists to replace that flat national framing with a county-level score that is always anchored to local income, so the comparison is apples to apples no matter how rich or poor a region is.

The index is a 0 to 100 score. A higher score means more affordable. We deliberately chose that direction so the leaderboard reads the way people think: the markets at the top are the easiest to afford, the markets at the bottom are the most stretched. Every U.S. county we cover gets a score, which is what lets the screener answer questions like “show me the twenty most affordable counties that are also growing” in a single pass instead of forcing you to open three thousand pages by hand.

The three components

The score blends three inputs, each chosen because it captures a different slice of what “affordable” actually means in practice. We weight them so that the signal most tied to lived housing stress carries the most influence.

Rent-to-income ratio (weight 0.6).This is the workhorse of the index, and it carries the heaviest weight for good reason. Rent-to-income measures how much of a typical household’s income goes to rent. It is the metric housing economists and HUD use to define cost burden: a household paying more than 30 percent of income on housing is “cost burdened,” and above 50 percent is “severely cost burdened.” We invert this component before scoring, because a lower rent-to-income ratio means a more affordable market, so inverting it makes a low ratio push the final score up. Rent-to-income is the cleanest single read on affordability because it updates more often than home values, it reflects the real monthly cost facing roughly one in three U.S. households who rent, and it does not depend on mortgage-rate assumptions the way an ownership-cost figure does. When this ratio is low, it means local pay comfortably covers local rent, which is the heart of what makes a place livable on an ordinary income.

Median household income (weight 0.25).Income enters the score directly (higher income raises the score) because affordability is a relationship between cost and means, and means matter on their own. Two counties can post the same rent-to-income ratio, yet the higher-income county tends to offer more financial cushion: more room to absorb a rent increase, a surprise expense, or a job change without being pushed into cost burden. Including income directly also keeps the index honest about a known weakness of ratio-only measures, which is that a county can look “affordable” on a ratio simply because rents collapsed alongside the local economy. Pairing the ratio with an income level rewards markets where affordability comes from healthy earnings, not from decline.

HUD Fair Market Rent, 2-bedroom (weight 0.15). The third component is the HUD Fair Market Rent for a standard 2-bedroom home, inverted so that a lower local rent floor pushes the score up. HUD Fair Market Rents are published annually for every metro and non-metro county area and represent roughly the 40th percentile of rents for standard-quality units, which makes them a stable, federally maintained estimate of the local cost floor for a typical family-sized rental. We weight it lightest because it is a level rather than a ratio: it tells you what rent costs in absolute dollars, which is most useful as a cross-check on the income-relative signals above. A county can have a modest rent-to-income ratio and still carry a high absolute rent floor if incomes are very high; folding in the HUD figure keeps the index grounded in what a family would actually pay at the door.

How the three pieces become one score

Combining three inputs that live on completely different scales (a ratio, a dollar income figure, and a dollar rent figure) requires a normalization step, otherwise the largest raw number would dominate the result. Each component is first ranked against every other county in the country, so what enters the blend is a county’s relative standing on that input rather than its raw value. Ranking by percentile this way keeps the index robust to outliers: a single county with an unusually extreme rent or income cannot distort the rest of the distribution, and the score stays meaningful across the full range from the densest coastal metros to the most rural counties. After each component is placed on this common 0 to 100 footing, we apply the weights described above, 0.6 for rent-to-income, 0.25 for income, and 0.15 for the HUD Fair Market Rent, and sum them into the final Affordability Index. The inverted components (rent-to-income and the HUD rent floor) are flipped before weighting so that lower cost always pushes the composite up, which is what makes a higher final score reliably mean a more affordable place. The upshot is a single, comparable number per county that you can sort, screen, and trend, built from inputs that on their own would be impossible to compare directly.

Why rent-to-income, not price-to-income

A reasonable question is why the index leans on rent rather than home prices, since most affordability headlines are about buying. There are three practical reasons. First, rent is a faster and more frequently updated signal than home values, so the index reacts to changing conditions sooner. Second, rent is the cost actually borne by the large share of households who do not own, and those are often the households for whom affordability is the most pressing question. Third, an ownership-cost figure is extremely sensitive to the mortgage-rate assumption you plug in, which means small assumption changes can swing a price-to-income measure wildly; rent-to-income sidesteps that fragility. None of this means ownership is ignored. The HUD Fair Market Rent component and the income component both speak to the ownership picture indirectly, and for buyers specifically we publish separate buyer-focused scores like cap rate and net monthly cash flow that bring the mortgage math front and center.

How to read the leaderboard

The table above lists the twenty-five counties with the highest Affordability Index scores in the country right now. Because the score is income-relative, the list usually mixes lower-cost interior markets with some higher-income areas where pay has kept pace with rent. That mix is the point: the index is not a “cheapest rent” list, it is a “best value relative to what people earn” list. If you are relocating, the top of this list flags places where a typical local income stretches furthest. If you are an investor, a high affordability score can be a sign of a stable tenant base that is not stretched thin on housing, though you will want to read it alongside the cap-rate and crash-risk scores rather than on its own.

Click any county to open its full Affordability Index detail page, which shows the score in context, how it has trended over time, and the other Curb Report scores for that market side by side. From there you can jump to the interactive county map to see how affordability varies across the surrounding region, since affordability rarely stops at a county line.

Reading affordability alongside the other scores

Affordability is most useful when you read it next to the other Curb Report signals, because the same score can mean very different things depending on what surrounds it. A high Affordability Index paired with net in-migration and a positive price forecast is the strongest combination: it points to a market that is currently within reach and getting more popular, which usually means affordability is being earned through a healthy local economy rather than through stagnation. A high Affordability Index paired with persistent out-migration and a flat or negative forecast tells a different story, one where housing is cheap relative to income partly because demand has softened. Neither pattern is good or bad on its own; the right read depends entirely on what you are trying to do. A family relocating for a steady job may happily trade growth for a market where their income goes furthest, while an investor counting on appreciation will want affordability that coincides with inflows and rising values. The whole reason every county carries a full slate of scores is so you never have to judge affordability in a vacuum.

Regional patterns also show up clearly once you sort the whole country by the index. Much of the most affordable territory sits across the interior of the country, in the Midwest and parts of the South, where incomes are moderate but rents have stayed proportionate. A handful of higher-income metros score surprisingly well because pay has kept pace with housing costs, while several fast-growing Sun Belt and Mountain West markets that were once bargains have slid down the rankings as rents outran wages. The coastal markets that dominate national affordability headlines tend to land near the bottom, which the index captures faithfully. Watching where a county sits today, and which direction it is drifting year over year, is often more informative than the single snapshot, because a market falling from the top of the affordability rankings is exactly the kind of place where renters and buyers start to feel squeezed first.

What the index is not

The Affordability Index is a screening and education tool, not a personalized budget. It uses county-level medians, so it describes the typical household in a place, not your specific situation. Your own affordability depends on your income, your down payment, the rate you can lock, your other debts, and the exact home you choose. The index is also not a forecast: a high score today tells you a market is affordable now, not that it will stay that way. Affordability can erode quickly when rents climb faster than wages, which is exactly why we recommend pairing the score with the price-forecast and migration data to see whether a currently affordable market is heading toward more or less pressure. Use the index to narrow three thousand counties down to a short list worth a closer look, then do the property-level math on the specific homes you are considering.

Run the Curb Checktool on any Zillow or Redfin listing in these markets to get instant property-level math (estimated cap rate, gross yield, cash-on-cash return, and a risk flag) in under ten seconds, so you can move from “this county looks affordable” to “this specific home pencils out” without leaving the page.