It truly pays to live and work in Dallas or Fort Worth. A new ranking from BusinessStudent.com puts the two cities — and Houston, too — among the top 10 places in the U.S. for stretching your salary.
To come up with its ranking, BusinessStudent.com examined the average annual salary for 127 white-collar “business” jobs listed on career website Indeed — such as HR director, marketing manager, and IT manager — and subtracted the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment, based on data from apartment search website Rent Jungle. According to that measure, Dallas is No. 4, Houston is No. 7, and Fort Worth is No. 9.
The BusinessStudent.com study calculated an average yearly salary of $82,609 in Dallas and average monthly rent of $1,422 for a two-bedroom apartment. That resulted in a difference of $65,545, behind Palo Alto and San Jose, both in Northern California, and Detroit.
In Big D, at least, all types of workers are benefiting from stable rent growth. According to apartment search website Apartment List, the growth of rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Dallas has been flat of late, while it’s gone up 3.6 percent in Houston over the past year, 0.8 percent in Austin, 0.4 percent in San Antonio, and 1.8 percent statewide.
“Dallas is still more affordable than most other large cities across the country,” Apartment List says.
In Houston, BusinessStudent.com computed an average yearly salary of and an average monthly rent of $79,579 for a two-bedroom apartment. The difference: $62,767.
Aside from Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston, Irving (No. 12) and Plano (No. 19) showed up in BusinessStudent.com’s top 25.