Everything else equal, we can all agree that living in a cheaper place is better than living in a more expensive place.
I’d much rather pay $500/mo in rent than $1,000. And I’d rather pay $2 for coffee than $5.
And while every neighborhood in Boston might be more expensive than living in rural Massachusetts, there are certain neighborhoods that are definitely cheaper.
What exactly are those Boston neighborhoods where your dollar goes a little further — you can get that one bedroom instead of the studio?
Instead of relying on public opinion and speculation, we wanted to get the facts straight and determine which neighborhoods in Boston are the cheapest using Saturday Night Science.
147 cost of living index
164 cost of living index
133 cost of living index
125 cost of living index
158 cost of living index
186 cost of living index
167 cost of living index
190 cost of living index
155 cost of living index
163 cost of living index
The receipts
Compare the top ten
Pick a metric. The bars rescale. The red line is Massachusetts’s statewide median.
Saturday Night Science
Methodology: How we determined the cheapest Boston hoods in 2026
To rank the cheapest places to live in Boston, we had to determine what criteria define “cheap” and then apply Saturday Night Science.
Using Census and extrapolated BLS data, we arrived at the following set of criteria:
- Overall Cost Of Living
- Rent To Income Ratio
- Median Home Value To Income Ratio
We then ranked each neighborhood with scores from 1 to 16 in each category, where 1 was the cheapest.
Next, we averaged the rankings for each neighborhood to create a cheap neighborhood index.
And finally, we crowned the neighborhood with the lowest cheapest neighborhood index, the “Cheapest City Neighborhood In Boston.” We’re lookin’ at you, Hyde Park.
We updated this article for 2026. Skip to the end to see the list of all the neighborhoods in the city, from cheapest to most expensive.
The full plate
Detailed list of the cheapest neighborhoods to live in Boston for 2026
Click any column to sort. Search by neighborhood name.
| Rank | Neighborhood | Cost Of Living Index |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hyde Park | 147 |
| 2 | West Roxbury | 164 |
| 3 | Allston-Brighton | 133 |
| 4 | Fenway-Kenmore | 125 |
| 5 | Roslindale | 158 |
| 6 | Charlestown | 186 |
| 7 | Central | 167 |
| 7 | South Boston | 190 |
| 9 | South Dorchester | 155 |
| 10 | North Dorchester | 163 |
| 11 | Jamaica Plain | 174 |
| 12 | Mattapan | 151 |
| 13 | East Boston | 161 |
| 14 | Back Bay-Beacon Hill | 188 |
| 15 | Roxbury | 155 |
| 16 | South End | 229 |
Source: U.S. Census ACS 2020-2024. All 16 Boston neighborhoods.
Summary
Summary: Lowest cost places to live in Boston
If you’re measuring the neighborhoods in Boston where prices are low, and it’s cheap to live, this is an accurate list.
The most affordable neighborhoods in Boston are Hyde Park, West Roxbury, Allston-Brighton, Fenway-Kenmore, Roslindale, Charlestown, Central, South Boston, South Dorchester, and North Dorchester.
As mentioned earlier, the neighborhoods in Boston aren’t all cheap. South End takes the title of the most expensive neighborhood to live in Boston.
We ranked the neighborhoods from cheapest to most expensive in the chart below. Not sold on Massachusetts? Take the two-minute Find Your Place quiz and see which state actually fits you.
Questions and answers
Cheapest Neighborhoods In Boston FAQs
What is the cheapest neighborhood in Boston?
Hyde Park is the cheapest neighborhood in Boston for 2026. It posts the best combination of overall cost of living, rent against income, and home prices against income. West Roxbury and Allston-Brighton are next.
What are the cheapest neighborhoods in Boston?
The cheapest neighborhoods in Boston are Hyde Park, West Roxbury, Allston-Brighton, Fenway-Kenmore, Roslindale, Charlestown, Central, South Boston, South Dorchester, and North Dorchester. We ranked all 16 neighborhoods in the city.
How do you decide which neighborhoods are cheapest?
Three measures: an overall cost of living index, rent-to-income, and home-value-to-income, all from Census tract data. Scoring costs against local incomes keeps one luxury tower from skewing the math.
Is a cheap neighborhood a bad neighborhood?
Not necessarily — this ranking measures what things cost relative to income, nothing else. Check our safest neighborhoods in Boston ranking before you sign a lease, because cheap and safe are separate questions.
What is the most expensive neighborhood in Boston?
South End lands at the expensive end of the 16 neighborhoods we scored. If your budget disagrees with it, the rest of the list runs cheaper.
