A new report found San Jose residents, on average, pay more in monthly household bills than people in any major U.S. city.
According to new numbers from online payment platform Doxo, San Jose tops the list when it comes to the amount residents spend annually on 13 household bills. The median amount for San Jose residents was $44,947 per year.
“The collective bundle is one of the highest in the country. And that’s just the nature of living in the Bay Area, but a lot of that it’s actually in the housing portion of it. So, when we look at the cost overall, it’s 78% higher in San Jose than the U.S. median for those same 13 essential bills. When you take out housing, tho, it’s still very high, it’s about 47% higher than the national median,” Doxo CEO Steve Shivers said.
San Francisco ranked as the third most expensive in the nation for the same household bills.
For both areas, housing was a big part of the reason why, but it wasn’t the only reason. Things like auto insurance also make a bigger dent in people’s budgets.
“The average in the region is about $336 a month in auto insurance and that compares to the national average. The national media is about $109, so it’s very much higher in the Bay Area for auto insurance,” Shivers said.
Second Harvest of Silicon Valley leaders say the increasing cost of living is sending more people to the food bank.
“We doubled in terms of the number of people we’re serving and really those numbers have not gone down significantly, and that’s because the cost of living has continued to rise. Hunger doesn’t look like what most people are expecting in our community,” Second Harvest of Silicon Valley CEO Leslie Bacho said.
NBC Bay Area reached out to San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who outlined what his city is doing to try and ease the burden of high costs.
In a statement he said, “We’re doing what we can to help at the city level– jump starting construction of thousands of homes to help bring down rent and cutting electricity bills by 4% through San Jose Clean Energy.”
The report found Detroit was the least expensive city for household bills, followed by Cleveland.
