You need an annual household income of roughly $237,000 to qualify for a mortgage on the median San Jose home at today’s rates. You need $58,000 in Pittsburgh. Same down payment percentage. Same debt-to-income ratio. Same lender math. The four-times multiplier between top and bottom is the largest gap in the eleven years Zillow has published this series.
The proportional-symbol map below sizes a circle on each of the top 100 U.S. metros by required salary. The clusters are familiar. The West Coast and Northeast Corridor lead. The Sun Belt now matters far more than it did pre-2021. The Midwest still anchors the affordable end. But the within-cluster spread has widened sharply. Boise jumped from a $74,000 required salary in 2020 to $148,000 today. Tampa-St. Petersburg roughly doubled. Phoenix now requires more than Chicago. Miami requires more than Boston. The geography of “where can a normal income buy” has rearranged itself in five years more thoroughly than in the prior twenty.
The math behind every circle is the same: a 28% debt-to-income standard, 20% down, and the prevailing Freddie Mac 30-year fixed rate of 6.78% as of April 24, 2026. Property taxes are folded in at the metro-effective rate. Insurance is included at metro averages, which now matters meaningfully on the Florida and California coasts, where homeowner premiums alone have added $4,000–$9,000 to required annual income compared with three years ago. None of these numbers are forecasts. They are what the mortgage calculator returns today.
The real question this map raises is not where the expensive cities are. Everyone knows that. The question is how recently the affordable cities stopped being affordable. Charlotte, Nashville, Salt Lake City, and Raleigh all crossed $100,000 in required salary inside the last 36 months. The map you are looking at is a snapshot of a still-moving target.
Methodology
Median home value comes from Zillow’s ZHVI series for April 2026. The required-salary calculation assumes a 28% front-end debt-to-income ratio, a 20% down payment, and the Freddie Mac PMMS 30-year fixed rate of 6.78% as of April 24, 2026. Property tax is metro-effective; homeowner’s insurance uses NAIC metro averages. Required salary is derived as (monthly PITI ÷ 0.28) × 12.
Caveats
- Mortgage rates move. This map is dated to a specific Freddie Mac PMMS release and will be re-rendered when the rate moves more than 25 basis points.
- ZHVI is a typical-home index and does not isolate “starter” homes specifically. Readers in markets with bifurcated stock should treat the headline number as a household-affordability proxy, not a literal floor.
- The 28% DTI and 20% down assumptions exclude a large share of actual buyers (FHA, VA, first-time-buyer programs) for whom the qualifying math is meaningfully different.