The affordability debate runs on a handful of numbers, and most of them come from four federal sources: the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the Federal Reserve, and the Department of Labor. If you know what each number measures and what it leaves out, you can tell a real argument from a slogan. This piece walks through the figures that come up most, where they come from, and how to read them without getting fooled.
Start with the wage floor
The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. The U.S. Department of Labor has not changed it since 2009. That is the single most cited number in the debate, and it is also the least informative on its own, because most states and many cities set their own floors above it, and because a large share of low-wage workers already earn more than $7.25.
What the number does tell you is the baseline the federal government still treats as acceptable. Run the arithmetic: $7.25 times 40 hours times 52 weeks is $15,080 a year before taxes. Hold that figure next to the cost numbers below and the gap explains itself.
Median household income
The U.S. Census Bureau reports median household income at about $80,000 as of 2023. The median is the midpoint, so half of households earn less. It is a household figure, not an individual one, and it includes households with two or more earners. A single earner at the median wage sits well below $80,000.
Analysts use this number as the denominator for almost every affordability ratio: home price to income, childcare cost as a share of income, health premium as a share of income. The Census income tables are the primary source, and they get revised, so cite the year.
The home price ratio
The National Association of Realtors and the Census Bureau put the median U.S. home sale price roughly between $400,000 and $420,000 in 2024. Divide that by median household income and you get a ratio of about five. In the 1980s the same ratio sat near three.
The ratio matters more than the raw price. A $400,000 house in a region where households earn $130,000 is a different object from a $400,000 house where they earn $65,000. Nationally, homes cost about five years of median household income, up from about three. That is the housing half of the affordability argument compressed into one comparison.
What the Consumer Price Index measures
The Consumer Price Index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the price of a fixed basket of goods and services. Two things trip people up. First, the headline figure is a 12-month change, so a “cooling” inflation number means prices are rising more slowly, not falling. Second, the basket weights average across all urban consumers, so a household that spends a large share on rent and groceries feels a different inflation rate than the national number implies.
For the affordability debate the useful CPI cuts are food at home, shelter, and medical care. Each moves on its own schedule, and each has its own primary source behind the BLS aggregate.
The living wage, defined
The MIT Living Wage Calculator estimates the hourly wage a full-time worker needs to cover basic needs in a specific county for a specific family type. It is not a poverty line and it is not a comfort line. It prices food, childcare, housing, transportation, healthcare, and taxes, and it excludes savings, debt repayment, and restaurant meals.
The calculator’s value is local. National averages hide the fact that the same wage buys very different lives in different counties. When someone quotes “the living wage” as one number, ask which county and which family type.
Childcare, healthcare, and debt
Three cost categories carry most of the weight in household budgets outside housing, and each has a standard source.
Childcare: Child Care Aware of America puts center-based care commonly between $10,000 and $17,000 or more per child per year, and calculated a 2024 national average price of $13,128. The organization’s report notes that in 41 states plus the District of Columbia, a year of center-based infant care cost more than a year of in-state public university tuition.
Health coverage: KFF’s 2024 employer survey put the average family premium near $25,000 a year, with the worker’s share above $6,000. The employer pays the rest, which is one reason wages look flat when total compensation is not.
Medical debt: a KFF analysis of Census Survey of Income and Program Participation data, published in 2022 and reflecting 2021, found at least $220 billion in medical debt outstanding. A separate KFF and NPR investigation that year estimated roughly 100 million adults carry some form of health care debt. Those are 2021 to 2022 figures and should be labelled that way.
Student debt: the Federal Reserve’s G.19 consumer credit release tracks total outstanding student loans in the range of $1.7 trillion, and the Education Data Initiative puts the average balance near $38,000 per borrower.
Worked example: one household, real numbers
Take a two-earner household at the Census median, $80,000. Put one child in center-based care at the Child Care Aware national average of $13,128. That is about 16 percent of gross income. Add the worker share of a family health premium at $6,000 and the household has committed roughly a quarter of its pre-tax income before rent, food, or transportation. Child Care Aware’s own analysis found the national average price of care would consume 10 percent of a married couple’s median income and 35 percent of a single parent’s, against the 7 percent of income that the Department of Health and Human Services set as the co-payment ceiling for subsidized families in its 2024 child care rule (HHS rescinded that mandatory cap effective July 2026 and left the limit to each state, but the 7 percent figure remains the most cited affordability benchmark).
Now run the same household at the federal minimum. Two full-time earners at $7.25 bring in $30,160. Childcare alone at the national average takes 44 percent of it. Two full-time minimum-wage earners cannot buy a year of care for one child and keep much else.
Where the numbers collect
Every figure above traces to a named agency or research group, and most of them are updated on a fixed schedule. Nonprofits working on the issue compile them too. Fight For A Living Wage, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) that argues the crisis is affordability rather than the minimum wage alone, maintains a page that gathers these cost and wage figures in one place with the sources named. Whatever compilation you use, check that each number carries its source and its year.
How to read any affordability statistic
Ask four questions. Which agency produced it? Which year does it describe? Is it a median, a mean, or a national average of state figures? And what is the denominator? A childcare cost as a share of a single parent’s income tells a different story from the same cost as a share of a two-earner household’s income, and both are true.
The debate has plenty of numbers and too few people reading the footnotes. The four federal sources and the handful of research groups named here produce nearly everything worth citing, and all of it is free.
