The National Low Income Housing Coalition took those fair market rents and calculated how much a worker would have to earn per hour to cover such modest housing, if we assume a 40-hour work week and a 52-week year. They call this rate a "housing wage," and it is, unsurprisingly, much higher than the minimum wage in much of the country.
We've mapped this more detailed data in the interactive below. This is what you'd need to earn per hour, working a 40-hour week, to cover the kind of housing that the federal government considers modest in your county:
Click through for interactive version »
Mapped in finer detail than by state, several geographic patterns are clearer. No single county in America has a one-bedroom housing wage below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 (several counties in Arkansas come in at $7.98).Coastal and urban counties are among the most expensive. Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo counties in California rank as the least affordable in the country (scroll over each county in the interactive version for rankings; click to zoom). In each of those counties, a one-bedroom hourly housing wage is $29.83, or the equivalent of 3.7 full-time jobs at the actual minimum wage (or an annual salary of about $62,000).
[Note: Prince Georges County was $23.83, and tied for 13 out of 3144 counties.]
Top most expensive counties:
| State | County | 1-br. housing wage |
| California | Marin | $29.83 |
| California | San Francisco | $29.83 |
| California | San Mateo | $29.83 |
| Hawaii | Honolulu | $26.58 |
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