NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) -- New York families need six-figure incomes to live without government assistance in all five boroughs of New York City, according to two new reports.
One report, released by the Fund for the City of New York, measures the “self-sufficiency standard,” or the income a working household needs to earn to meet its basic needs without receiving any government or private assistance. The analysis has been released regularly since the year 2000.
The median annual income necessary for a four-person family with two school-age kids to afford to live in the city reached $133,000 in 2026, according to the report. Forty-six percent of New York City households aren’t earning enough to survive without outside financial assistance from government or private resources, the report found.
A separate report released Monday by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office, intended to measure the “true cost of living” in New York City, found more than 5 million people, or 62% of city residents, including those who receive government aid, were experiencing economic insecurity in 2022 — earning incomes insufficient to both cover their basic needs and generate savings to draw on in case of financial crises.
Families with children needed to earn a median $159,197 to cover the costs of living in the city, the report found.
The releases are the latest evidence that New York City has become unaffordable to a growing number of its residents, a problem Mamdani highlighted in his campaign last year. The mayor promised to provide free universal childcare for children age six weeks to five years, to make city buses free and to freeze rents in stabilized apartments — all measures intended to mitigate high and rising costs for basic necessities.
“This is not a crisis affecting a small minority of New Yorkers. It is a crisis touching the vast majority of our city, in every borough and every neighborhood,” Mamdani said in a statement. He noted that Black and Latino residents are bearing the brunt of the affordability issues.
Bloomberg
A family of two working parents, a preschool-age child and a school-age child living in the Bronx needs to earn $125,814 a year, data from the Fund’s report shows. That level has risen 162% since 2000, when the same Bronx family would need annual income of $48,077 to cover child care, housing, food, health care, transportation and taxes.
In Northwest Brooklyn, the same size family would need to earn $154,000 a year, up more than 213% from the minimum for all of Brooklyn in 2000. Thresholds for self-sufficiency have risen by triple-digit percentages in every borough over the past quarter-century.
Having children significantly increases a family’s costs. The Fund’s report, dated last month, found 49% of married households with children are earning less than they need to survive, while the report released by Mamdani’s office found the only New York City families earning enough to cover the costs of living in the city in 2022 were those with two adults and no children.
According to the city-issued report, roughly 1.2 million children, or 73% of the city’s population under age 18, lived in families whose incomes were below the true cost of living threshold.
High costs have contributed to an exodus of middle-class families with children and an overall decline in the number of young children residing in the city. Between 2020 and 2024, the number of children under age 5 living in the city declined by 18%, according to US Census data.
Single parents bear a much greater economic burden, the city-issued report found. Eighty-four percent of single parents with one child earned less than the cost of living threshold in 2022. For single parents with more than one child, economic insecurity was widespread — 94% of single parents with two children and 99% of single parents with three children earned less than what they needed to live in the city.
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