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 Hayward might be more expensive than living in rural California, there are certain neighborhoods that are definitely cheaper.
What exactly are those Hayward 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 Hayward are the cheapest using Saturday Night Science.
164 cost of living index
170 cost of living index
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Located in
Alameda County, California
Santa Clara is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city’s population was 116,468 at the 2010 United States Census, making it the ninth-most populous city in the San Francisco Bay Area. Located 45 miles southeast of San Francisco, the city was founded in 1777 with the establishment of Mission Santa Clara de Ass, the eighth of 21 California missions. The city was later incorporated in 1852. The mission, the city, and the county are all named for Saint Clare of Assisi.
Data | Crime | Cost of living | Movers
194 cost of living index
171 cost of living index
169 cost of living index
169 cost of living index
The receipts
Compare the top ten
Pick a metric. The bars rescale. The red line is California’s statewide median.
Saturday Night Science
Methodology: How we determined the cheapest Hayward hoods in 2026
To rank the cheapest places to live in Hayward, 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 Hayward.” We’re lookin’ at you, Whitman-Mocine.
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 Hayward for 2026
Click any column to sort. Search by neighborhood name.
| Rank | Neighborhood | Cost Of Living Index |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Whitman-Mocine | 164 |
| 2 | Mission-Garin | 170 |
| 3 | Fairway Park | 185 |
| 4 | Jackson Triangle | 167 |
| 5 | Glen Eden | 167 |
| 5 | Santa Clara | 169 |
| 7 | Hayward Highland | 194 |
| 8 | Southgate | 171 |
| 8 | Tennyson-Alquire | 169 |
| 10 | Upper B Street | 169 |
| 11 | Harder-Tennyson | 163 |
| 11 | Longwood-Winton Grove | 163 |
| 11 | Mt Eden | 171 |
| 14 | Mission-Foothill | 169 |
| 15 | Burbank | 175 |
| 16 | North Hayward | 172 |
Source: U.S. Census ACS 2020-2024. All 16 Hayward neighborhoods.
Summary
Summary: Lowest cost places to live in Hayward
If you’re measuring the neighborhoods in Hayward where prices are low, and it’s cheap to live, this is an accurate list.
The most affordable neighborhoods in Hayward are Whitman-Mocine, Mission-Garin, Fairway Park, Jackson Triangle, Glen Eden, Santa Clara, Hayward Highland, Southgate, Tennyson-Alquire, and Upper B Street.
As mentioned earlier, the neighborhoods in Hayward aren’t all cheap. North Hayward takes the title of the most expensive neighborhood to live in Hayward.
We ranked the neighborhoods from cheapest to most expensive in the chart below. Not sold on California? Take the two-minute Find Your Place quiz and see which state actually fits you.
Questions and answers
Cheapest Neighborhoods In Hayward FAQs
What is the cheapest neighborhood in Hayward?
Whitman-Mocine is the cheapest neighborhood in Hayward for 2026. It posts the best combination of overall cost of living, rent against income, and home prices against income. Mission-Garin and Fairway Park are next.
What are the cheapest neighborhoods in Hayward?
The cheapest neighborhoods in Hayward are Whitman-Mocine, Mission-Garin, Fairway Park, Jackson Triangle, Glen Eden, Santa Clara, Hayward Highland, Southgate, Tennyson-Alquire, and Upper B Street. 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 Hayward ranking before you sign a lease, because cheap and safe are separate questions.
What is the most expensive neighborhood in Hayward?
North Hayward lands at the expensive end of the 16 neighborhoods we scored. If your budget disagrees with it, the rest of the list runs cheaper.
