How Much Money You Need to Reach FIRE in America's Largest Metro Areas (2026)

A single adult needs an estimated $1.5 million to just over $2 million to reach FIRE in America’s 75 largest metros, under our baseline assumptions. San Francisco sits at the top at roughly $2,023,228 and McAllen, Texas at the bottom at $1,503,163, a $520,065 spread that comes mostly down to housing.

That spread is the point of this study. The FIRE movement compresses retirement math into one elegant shortcut, 25 times your annual spending, but annual spending is not one number in one country. We took a disclosed $70,000 single-adult budget, scaled it by each metro’s official price level from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and ran the same withdrawal-rate math our FIRE calculator uses on every one of the 75 largest US metros. The result is a map of where the 25x rule is merely expensive and where it is brutal, plus a finding the sticker prices hide: the metros where FIRE looks cheapest are often the hardest places to reach it on a local paycheck.

Key findings

These are metro starting points, not personal targets. Your own spending sets your real number, and the FIRE calculator turns it into one in about a minute.

Findings you can copy

Quote these as written, with attribution to FinExplained and a link to this page (the full dataset is CC BY 4.0).

Under a $70,000 national baseline, a single adult’s estimated FIRE target at the 4 percent rule is $1.75 million, and metro price levels swing it from about $1.5 million to just over $2 million, according to a FinExplained analysis.

A single adult in San Francisco needs roughly $2.02 million to reach FIRE under our baseline assumptions, the highest estimated target of America’s 75 largest metros.

Miami has the second highest estimated FIRE target in the country, roughly $2 million under our baseline assumptions, while its median household income ranks among the lowest of the 75 largest metros.

A single adult in New York needs roughly $1.97 million to reach FIRE under our baseline assumptions, according to a FinExplained analysis.

McAllen, Texas has the lowest estimated FIRE target of America’s 75 largest metros, roughly $1.5 million under our baseline assumptions, yet at 26.5 times the local median household income it is also the hardest to reach on a local paycheck.

The full ranking: what FIRE costs in all 75 metros

The table below ranks every metro by its estimated single-adult FIRE number at the 4 percent rule, most expensive first. The income multiple column divides that target by the metro’s median household income, which is the study’s realism check: a lower multiple means local earnings have a shorter climb to the local target. Each row links by anchor, so you can share your metro’s line directly.

Method: annual spend is the 70,000 dollar single-adult baseline times the metro's all-items Regional Price Parity divided by 100, and each FIRE number is that spend divided by the withdrawal rate (at 4 percent, the same as 25 times spend). The income multiple divides the 4 percent target by the metro's median household income; prices and incomes are both 2024 vintages (BEA released 2024 metro price parities in December 2025). Figures are educational estimates, not financial advice. Download the full dataset as CSV (CC BY 4.0, attribution required).

What is a FIRE number?

A FIRE number is the amount you need invested to cover your annual expenses indefinitely without working. The common estimate is 25 times annual spending, which is the 4 percent rule read backwards: withdraw 4 percent of the portfolio in year one, adjust for inflation after, and history says a diversified portfolio usually survives a 30-year retirement.

The withdrawal rate is the study’s biggest dial. At 3.5 percent, the planning choice many 40-year-horizon early retirees prefer, every target rises by a seventh; at William Bengen’s 2025 revised 4.7 percent, it falls by about the same share. San Francisco illustrates the range: $2,312,260 at 3.5 percent, $2,023,228 at 4 percent, and $1,721,896 at 4.7 percent. Whether 4 percent is still the right default is its own argument, and our FIRE number playbook walks through the Bengen and Morningstar cases in detail. This study holds 4 percent as the headline convention and shows 3.5 and 4.7 alongside it in the table above.

How we calculated FIRE for each metro

Two steps, both public. First, we set a national baseline of $70,000 in annual spending for a single adult, a disclosed modeling choice, and scaled it by each metro’s all-items Regional Price Parity from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which expresses local prices as a percent of the national average. Second, we divided that metro-adjusted spending by the withdrawal rate, the same formula behind our FIRE calculator.

Because every figure scales linearly with the baseline, you can re-fit the whole study to your own budget with one ratio. Spend $50,000 a year instead of $70,000 and every number in the table shrinks to five sevenths of what is printed. No visitor data is involved anywhere: the study runs entirely on published government statistics, and the full methodology, including what the model deliberately leaves out, is further down the page.

Which metros are most expensive for FIRE?

Coastal California, the big Northeast metros, Honolulu, and one Florida outlier. Eight of the ten most expensive FIRE metros touch salt water, and five are in California alone. The estimated single-adult targets at the 4 percent rule:

Miami is the row worth staring at. The other nine pair high prices with high incomes; Miami pairs a $1,997,713 estimated target with an $80,625 median household income, a 24.78 multiple that looks nothing like its neighbors on this list. Expensive metro, modest paychecks: that combination is exactly what the income-gap section below measures.

Which metros are most affordable for FIRE?

Texas, Oklahoma, and the broader South. McAllen anchors the affordable end at an estimated $1,503,163, and no metro outside the South or Midwest appears in the cheapest fifteen. The ten lowest estimated targets:

A low sticker price is real money: a McAllen-priced budget needs $520,065 less in portfolio terms than a San Francisco-priced one. But look at the right-hand column. Several of the cheapest metros carry the study’s widest income multiples, which means the local paycheck chasing that cheaper target is smaller still. Affordability and reachability are different questions, and the difference is the next section.

Where is FIRE most realistic on a local income?

Not where it is cheapest. Divide each metro’s estimated target by its median household income and the ranking flips: San Jose, the ninth most expensive metro by sticker price, has the smallest gap in the country at 11.73 times income, while McAllen, the cheapest metro in the study, has the widest at 26.5 times. High-income expensive metros consistently beat low-income cheap ones on this measure.

The mechanism is simple. Prices in the priciest metros run about 35 percent above the cheapest ones in this study, but median household incomes span nearly threefold, from $56,720 in McAllen to $164,801 in San Jose per the Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey. Income variation simply outruns price variation, so the paycheck side of the ledger dominates the realism math.

Read the multiple as years of gross median income, not years of saving: nobody saves 100 percent of a paycheck, and FIRE savers usually earn above their metro’s median. The median metro in the study sits near 20 times income (Richmond, at 20.52, is the midpoint). What the column reliably shows is direction. A household earning San Jose’s median has a target about 11.7 income-years away; the same exercise in McAllen stretches past 26 income-years. For anyone planning to earn in one metro and retire in another, that asymmetry is the whole geographic-arbitrage argument, and it is why the cheapest table above should never be read as the easiest.

One honest caveat belongs here: median household income describes each metro’s whole population, not its FIRE savers, so the multiple compares targets to typical local earnings rather than to your earnings. It is a realism lens, not a personal forecast, and your personal number may differ.

Why does housing change the FIRE number so much?

Because housing is the biggest line in almost every budget. Shelter and its costs take about a third of the average US household’s spending in the BLS Consumer Expenditure Surveys, and the share runs higher still in the most expensive metros. When one line item that large varies threefold between metros, it drags the whole FIRE target with it.

The cleanest way to see it is to take housing out. The chart below re-runs three flagship metros with twelve months of HUD’s FY2026 2-bedroom Fair Market Rent removed from the annual budget, which approximates what a paid-off home does to the math.

The cuts are enormous precisely where prices are highest: about $1,081,200 in San Francisco, $873,000 in New York, and $427,800 in San Antonio. Treat the paid-off bars as a floor rather than a target, because a mortgage-free house still costs property tax, insurance, and maintenance, so the true number lands between each pair of bars. The broader lesson holds either way: your housing decision moves your FIRE number more than any other choice, which is why it deserves real analysis. Our rent vs buy calculator compares the two paths on unrecoverable costs, and the home affordability calculator checks what a purchase does to the rest of your budget.

How do lean, regular, and chubby FIRE compare by metro?

The tiers are budget multipliers, and they are FIRE-community conventions, not official statistics: lean FIRE at 70 percent of the regular budget, chubby FIRE at 150 percent. Applied to the metro targets, they produce a useful reality check on what lifestyle choices cost in portfolio terms.

The cross-metro comparison is the interesting part. A chubby budget in McAllen needs an estimated $2,254,744, more than a regular budget in San Francisco at $2,023,228. Geography is a powerful lever, and lifestyle is a bigger one. There is also a third lever the tiers do not capture: timing. If your invested savings would grow to your target without another dollar of contributions, you have hit Coast FIRE, a milestone our Coast FIRE calculator finds in a few inputs and our Coast FIRE playbook explains in full.

How do you calculate your own FIRE number?

Estimate a year of real spending, pick a withdrawal rate, and divide. That is the entire method, and it works for your budget exactly the way it works for a metro’s. The four steps:

How to calculate your own FIRE number

1. Add up a year of real spending.Pull 12 months of statements and total what you actually spend in a year, including rent or housing costs, insurance, and the irregular bills that only arrive quarterly or annually. Actual spending beats a guess; most people are surprised by the true figure.
2. Pick a withdrawal rate.Choose the share of your portfolio you plan to spend each year. The classic planning default is 4 percent. Many early retirees plan at 3.5 percent for horizons of 40 years or more, and William Bengen's 2025 revision argues history supports 4.7 percent.
3. Divide spending by the rate.Divide annual spending by the withdrawal rate as a decimal. At 4 percent, that is the same as multiplying annual spending by 25, so a $60,000 budget implies an estimated target of $1.5 million. This is a planning estimate, not a guarantee.
4. Adjust for what the averages miss.Move the number for a paid-off home, healthcare before Medicare, dependents, state taxes, and how flexible your spending could be in a bad market. Metro averages are a useful starting point, and your personal number may differ from every one of them.

Step one is where most estimates fail. If you have never measured a full year of spending, the 50/30/20 budget calculator is a fast way to structure the exercise before you commit to a number. For couples, shared housing means the math scales gently rather than doubling: this study models a couple at 1.5 times the single-adult budget, the OECD-modified equivalence convention, which puts a San Francisco couple near $3,034,841 at 4 percent.

When you have your annual figure, the FIRE calculator does the rest: it computes your number at your withdrawal rate, projects your savings trajectory toward it in today’s dollars, and shows how many years the current pace implies.

The full methodology

Universe. The 75 largest US metropolitan statistical areas by the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2024 population estimates, using the OMB metro definitions issued in July 2023. Short city names label each metro; the full official MSA titles are in the table and the CSV.

The spending model. We set a national baseline of $70,000 in annual spending for a single adult. That is a disclosed modeling choice, not a measured figure: for scale, the BLS reports average annual expenditures of $78,535 per consumer unit in 2024, but a consumer unit averages about 2.4 people, while a single early retiree still carries a full household’s fixed costs alone. Each metro’s spending is the baseline times its 2024 all-items Regional Price Parity from BEA, divided by 100. Because the model is linear, rescaling to your own budget is one ratio, and no figure should be read as precise to the dollar.

The targets. Each FIRE number divides metro spending by the withdrawal rate: 4 percent as the headline, with 3.5 and 4.7 percent alongside. Lean (0.70x) and chubby (1.50x) tiers and the 1.5x couple adjustment are disclosed conventions described above. A family-of-four scenario is deliberately absent: we could not ground metro-level childcare costs in a citable federal source for all 75 metros, and we do not guess. All arithmetic runs through the same decimal-precise calculation engine as the site’s calculators, and every published figure is pinned by automated tests.

What the price index can and cannot say. A Regional Price Parity measures prices, not spending. To check how far that distinction stretches, we compared our price-derived spending against what households actually spend in the 21 study metros the BLS Consumer Expenditure Surveys publish, with both sides normalized to the national average. Actual spending diverges from price-implied spending by -28 percent (Miami) to +30.5 percent (San Francisco), with a rank correlation of 0.514, and the direction is systematic: high-income metros out-spend their price levels and lower-income metros under-spend them, because spending follows incomes, household sizes, and housing tenure as much as prices. Every per-metro gap ships in the CSV’s companion fixture and stays within a documented 32 percent tolerance enforced by our tests. The practical reading: treat each metro figure as a price-adjusted baseline for one standard of living, not a prediction of what residents there actually spend.

Taxes, healthcare, and the other honest gaps. Spending here means after-tax spending, the way the FIRE community and our calculator frame it. We deliberately did not model a metro-by-metro tax gross-up, which would manufacture false precision; directionally, payroll taxes end at retirement, and no-income-tax states such as Texas, Florida, Nevada, and Washington are somewhat cheaper than the headline implies. Healthcare before Medicare, sequence-of-returns risk, and neighborhood-level price differences within a metro are not modeled. Median household income describes each metro’s whole population, not its FIRE savers. Every figure is a planning estimate under our baseline assumptions, not financial advice.

Refresh cadence. BEA releases new metro price parities each December and the Census Bureau releases new ACS income figures each September; the study refreshes annually on that cycle, with changes recorded in the site changelog.

Data sources

• BEA Regional Price Parities, all-items metro index, 2024 vintage (released December 2025).
• Census Bureau ACS 2024 1-year estimates, median household income by metro (table B19013, brief acsbr-025).
• Census Bureau population estimates, Vintage 2024, OMB July 2023 metro definitions.
• BLS Consumer Expenditure Surveys, metro tables, 2023-2024 two-year averages, used for validation only.
• HUD Fair Market Rents, FY2026 2-bedroom rents, used in the housing illustration.
• The full dataset is downloadable as CSV under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to FinExplained.

Your metro is only the starting point

The table tells you what a standard budget costs where you live, and that is genuinely useful for one decision: whether geography belongs in your FIRE plan. Everything else in the plan runs on your numbers, not your metro’s. Pull a year of real spending, choose the withdrawal rate you can defend to yourself, and run your own FIRE number. Your number will not match any row in this table, and it is the only one that matters.