
How much does senior living cost? It’s a fairly simple question, but it’s often not easy to find a straightforward answer, as costs can vary widely by location and the level of care offered. That’s why A Place for Mom developed the senior living cost map in 2016: to help you and your family see and compare average senior living costs across more than 2,000 U.S. cities and towns.
See and compare the average price of assisted living, memory care, independent living, and senior apartments by city.
(Source: A Place for Mom, 2012-2018. See our methods.)
To help you plan and pay for senior care, it’s important to understand all the options available to you and your family. Senior living costs vary across care types and from community to community, mostly due to differences in services, amenities, and the level of senior care offered. Here’s a quick breakdown of the housing and care types referenced in the map:
The map was developed in collaboration with Matthew Harris, who holds a doctorate in economics and is an associate professor of economics at University of Tennessee.
A Place for Mom’s senior living cost map is based on actual 2012-2018 rent and care charges collected from referred family move-ins to A Place for Mom community partners, and it includes inflation-adjusted zip-code-level median household data from American Community Survey five-year estimates. Additionally, the cost map uses median household income and 55+ population statistics from the Census API via the ACS package for the R statistical programming language.
Predictions for each region were derived from a multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) model. Consumer cost estimates are based on a proprietary machine-learning algorithm that models inflation-adjusted first-month rent and care charges. ZIP codes with a small number of move-ins borrow information about costs from nearby ZIP codes with similar median household income and older adult population share. City, metro, state, regional, and national estimates are a weighted average of ZIP-code-level estimates. ZIP code weights are based on the most recent five-year estimates of population counts of older adults from the American Community Survey.
Cost growth estimates compare the median first-month rent and care charges for a given property and type of care to the median charges in the previous year for the same property and care type.
Note: Texas and Oklahoma estimates are unavailable, as APFM did not collect monthly care and rent charges due to state regulations.