The 10 Most Expensive Places To Live In West Virginia For 2023

The 10 Most Expensive Places To Live In West Virginia For 2023

1. Morgantown

The median income in Morgantown comes in at $36,991 and the median home value is $215,200 for 2023.

2. Martinsburg

The median income in Martinsburg comes in at $45,901 and the median home value is $164,100 for 2023.

3. Elkins

The median income in Elkins comes in at $36,909 and the median home value is $116,200 for 2023.

4. Beckley

The median income in Beckley comes in at $39,845 and the median home value is $110,600 for 2023.

5. Charles Town

The median income in Charles Town comes in at $79,158 and the median home value is $298,300 for 2023.

6. Charleston

The median income in Charleston comes in at $54,101 and the median home value is $157,000 for 2023.

7. Huntington

The median income in Huntington comes in at $34,351 and the median home value is $98,600 for 2023.

8. Buckhannon

The median income in Buckhannon comes in at $46,602 and the median home value is $133,600 for 2023.

9. Fairmont

The median income in Fairmont comes in at $47,618 and the median home value is $122,100 for 2023.

10. Wheeling

The median income in Wheeling comes in at $43,483 and the median home value is $116,300 for 2023.

Methodology: How We Determined The Most Expensive Places To Live In The Mountain State 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 West Virginia 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 25 places in West Virginia that have more than 5,000 people.

The place with the highest cost of living in West Virginia according to the data is Morgantown. You can download the data here.