The 10 Most Expensive Places To Live In Alaska For 2023

The 10 Most Expensive Places To Live In Alaska For 2023

1. Unalaska

The median income in Unalaska comes in at $94,271 and the median home value is $412,100 for 2023.

2. Homer

The median income in Homer comes in at $63,854 and the median home value is $309,500 for 2023.

3. Cordova

The median income in Cordova comes in at $77,667 and the median home value is $336,700 for 2023.

4. Wasilla

The median income in Wasilla comes in at $62,292 and the median home value is $272,600 for 2023.

5. Sitka

The median income in Sitka comes in at $82,083 and the median home value is $367,800 for 2023.

6. Kodiak

The median income in Kodiak comes in at $67,391 and the median home value is $264,500 for 2023.

7. Ketchikan

The median income in Ketchikan comes in at $68,125 and the median home value is $270,200 for 2023.

8. Juneau

The median income in Juneau comes in at $90,126 and the median home value is $358,200 for 2023.

9. Wrangell

The median income in Wrangell comes in at $54,891 and the median home value is $230,800 for 2023.

10. Anchorage

The median income in Anchorage comes in at $88,871 and the median home value is $327,500 for 2023.

Methodology: How We Determined The Most Expensive Places To Live In The Last Frontier For 2023

The two most important things to think about when it comes to being able to afford if you can live comes down to:

1. How much do money do I make?
2. How much do I have spend to live there?

You need to understand your costs in the context of how much money you make.

For example, if the median household earns $100,000 and spends $40,000 on housing it's actually cheaper to live there than a place with a median income of $50,000 and housing costs of $21,000. You might spend more on housing, but you have more money overall to play with.

With that example in mind, we derived several statistics from the latest Census American Community Survey 2017-2021 around incomes and costs. They are:

• Median Home Price / Median Income (lower is better)
• Median Income / Median Rent (Higher is better)
• Median Home Price

We added simply median home price because high home prices generally correlate with higher expenses for all costs related to homes (heating, electricity, etc).

You can then compare these metrics in each of the places in Alaska to figure out which is the most expensive.

What you are left with is a "Cost of Living Index" by taking the average rank of each of these metrics for each city.

So we used that cost of living index in order to rank all of the 29 places in Alaska that have more than 1,000 people.

The place with the highest cost of living in Alaska according to the data is Unalaska. You can download the data here.