In a recent post, we explored the Cost of Living Index (COLI) published by the Council for Community and Economic Research. This index features a base of 100, corresponding to a national average cost of living. While you can reference more of the findings in the earlier post, we highlight here some of the specific cost-of-living differences in the metro Atlanta area compared to other large metros.
The charts below are taken from the full slide deck (which can be downloaded here) and show the various cost of living expense categories for Atlanta and 5 peer metro areas: Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Nashville, and Washington, D.C.
The chart above shows average cost of living for the composite category (in blue) along with grocery (in red), housing (in green), utilities (in purple), transportation (in aqua), health care (in orange), and miscellaneous (in navy blue). Among the selected peer cities, Washington, D.C. is an obvious outlier, but only in the composite and housing categories. Metro Atlanta’s housing costs are middle-of-the-road among the other metro areas shown here, much lower that of D.C. and slightly lower than housing costs in Nashville. When compared to these other Sunbelt areas, our largest outliers cost-wise appear to be utilities, which are appreciably low, and health care, which are higher than any other metro shown aside from Charlotte.
This second chart shows the same data (for metro Atlanta), but this time compared to the 3 most expensive metro areas and 3 least expensive metro areas among the largest 25 metro areas in the US. As was the case with Washington, D.C. above, the housing cost category is the main driver in the composite score, with the other categories showing comparatively little variation. We see that metro Atlanta’s low utility costs compare favorably even to the low-cost metro areas of Minneapolis, San Antonio, and St. Louis. Its health care costs, on the other hand, are more on par with the 3 highest COLI metro areas than that of the 3 lowest COLI metro areas, indicating an area where local residents can expect to pay a higher premium than their counterparts elsewhere around the country.
In all, metro Atlanta’s costs in health care (and to a lesser extent, housing) are somewhat higher than the national average, but overall, this area is right around the national average in its composite cost of living index. Its lower utility costs likely help offset some of the relatively higher prices seen in health care and elsewhere.