The 10 Best St. Paul Suburbs To Live In For 2026

The 10 Best St. Paul Suburbs To Live For 2026

Deephaven is always mentioned as one of the best suburbs in the St. Paul area. We’ll tell you the good about “Awesome Deephaven.”

Everyone here is rich; families average $197,679 a year, which is the 3rd highest in the St. Paul region. And only 1.73% are out of work. Homes average more than $1,062,991 each.

Victoria is the second best ‘burb we looked at near St. Paul for 2026.

It ranks 4th for incomes in the area and only 1.13% of residents lack insurance, good for 11th best.

Here in Mendota Heights, it’s really safe, and residents are just about as rich as you’ll see in the St. Paul metro area.

The bad side? Schools are more crowded, and the cost of living puts a large part of the city out of reach for most families.

But price is based on demand and a lot of people want to live in Mendota Heights.

Plymouth ranks as the 4th best suburb of St. Paul for 2026.

You won’t find many better places to raise your kids in the region than in Plymouth and the schools are some of the best around.

Review Of Plymouth by HomeSnacks User

It has all the amenities that you may need including a wide array of grocery stores and places to eat.

There is a lack of diversity in the town and the rent and cost of living is higher than the surrounding areas in the west metro.

Coming in as the fifth best is Wayzata.

Wayzata gets kudos for having the 4th most expensive homes in the St. Paul area, where houses sell for an average of $913,297. However, the cost of living here is among the highest in the area.

Elko New Market is proud of its 6th place finish on this list. And here’s why.

Most residents have great jobs and the unemployment rate sits at 0.0%.

According to online reports, Elko New Market is quickly becoming one of the more affluent suburbs in the St. Paul area, meaning you need to get in soon.

The 7th best suburb on our list goes to Lake Elmo.

Lake Elmo schools are some of the best in the region, and crime is really low. The cost of living makes it a lot more desirable for many families, especially first-time home buyers.

And, it’s only 9.9 miles to downtown, which is a good thing.

Edina is growing quickly, and for a good reason. Crime is far below average, and most residents are gainfully employed. Even the cost of living is reasonable.

A solid 1.71% of people lack insurance, good for 17th in the area.

Review Of Edina by HomeSnacks User

It was the best of places, it was the worst of places. Like a lot of Minnesota, it’s really somewhere in the middle. And that’s Edina’s big problem, in a nutshell: in a state of bland, inoffensive, passive-aggressive soccer moms, it’s the try-hard city that cares more about style than substance. People from Edina do not *do* much of anything; they mostly just… exist. Preferably at the salon, or artisan coffee house, or highly overpriced grocery store, or failing that in a constant state of “gotta go!” en route from one activity desperately forced on offspring to help them seem interesting and relevant after another.

Edina occupies a convenient location, equidistant from all sorts of places anyone with two clues would much rather be. It’s pretty, the crime is low, the schools are doubtless ever-so-slightly above par, probably in some ever-so-slightly unethical way. There are nice parks. If you’re white and drive a minivan, you’ll feel right at home. The problem with Edina, you should understand, isn’t Edina itself. It’s the people. People from Edina. They’re bland and boring and self-obsessed. Drug-addled middle-managers, trophy wives, 2.4 heavily-medicated children per couple… they’re the laughing stock of the Twin Cities. People from Edina; joke and punchline, all in one. They don’t even get a neat name, like Minneapolitans, or Saint Paulites, or Little Canadians. Nope. People from Edina.

Is ‘Everything Better In Mahtomedi?’

Almost.

It placed 9th on our list thanks to the fact that it’s really expensive to live here, but the schools are great, so you get what you pay for in that regard.

And rounding out the top ten for 2026 is Rogers.

This city is far above average in every category, and the best part? It’s far more affordable than the other cities listed above. So, you get a big bang for your buck here.

Methodology: How We Determined The Best Suburbs Around St. Paul for 2026

Figuring out the best suburbs around St. Paul was simple. We used Saturday Night Science to find things people like about living in the suburbs and then locate the suburbs with those things.

We analyzed the newest American Community Survey data for 2020-2024 to research each suburb. We decided upon the following criteria:

• Low unemployment rate
• High median household incomes
• Population density (lots of things to do)
• High home values
• A lot of college-educated people
• Low poverty
• High rate of insured families

We defined a suburb as being within 30 miles of St. Paul.

Additionally, we limited the analysis to places that have over 2,000 people. This left us with a grand total of 99 suburbs to evaluate around St. Paul.

We ranked each place with scores from 1 to 99 in each category, where 1 was the “best.

Next, we averaged the rankings for each place to create a quality-of-life index.

Finally, we crowned the city with the best quality of life index, the “Best Suburb near St. Paul.” We’re lookin’ at you, Deephaven.

This result may differ from our state-wide data as we did not include commute times and crime for this analysis to allow for a more extensive selection of suburbs.

We updated the data for 2026. This report is our eleventh time ranking the best St. Paul suburbs. Skip to the end to see the list of all the suburbs ranked from best to worst.