Which states are the most and least affordable places for American families to live after paying taxes and their essential expenses?

The Common Sense Institute tallied up the numbers and ranked each state after subtracting federal and state taxes and also essential expenses like housing, utilities, groceries, auto and health insurance, fuel, and childcare in each state from the paychecks for a family of four with two adult breadwinners who work full time and earn the state's median hourly income.

Visual Capitalist's Dorothy Neufield then revisualized the results to focus on how much that of the modeled families' income remained. Here's her version of the Common Sense Institute's map:

Here's her analysis of the most and least affordable states:

In top-ranked states like Iowa, households keep nearly 35% of their income, about $2,900 per month. In Hawaii, that figure drops to just 9%. That’s a difference of more than $2,000 per month in disposable income.

[...]

Midwestern states dominate the rankings, largely due to lower housing and childcare costs.

Iowa ranks first, with households keeping 34.7% of their income, followed by South Dakota (34.6%) and North Dakota (33.5%).

[...]

In the least affordable states, families spend up to 91% of their income on essentials and taxes, leaving little room for savings or unexpected expenses.

Hawaii families are most strained, with 9% of income left, followed by California at 10.9%. Between 2019 and 2025, California households saw one of the largest declines in affordability across states.

Massachusetts, despite high incomes, ranks near the bottom. Childcare alone consumes 24% of household income, showing how a single cost category can erode income advantages.

The Common Sense Instutute also looks at how each state's affordability has changed from 2019 to 2025. They find that Kansas, New Mexico, and Utah have seen their cost of living fall the most, while Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and California have seen the biggest escalation in living expenses over these years.

References

Dorothy Neufield. Mapped: Where Americans Keep Most of Their Paycheck. Visual Capitalist. [Online article]. 27 April 2026.

Once upon a time, in 2005, we wrote about Solare, architect Paolo Soler's ambitious concept of the Lean Linear City of the future, a city without cars and without urban sprawl. Robert Ipsen describes the basic concept of how a city might be successfully configured to achieve that result:

The first step is not design. The first step is choosing the spine.

The corridor comes before the city

The Lean Linear City is organized around an arterial spine. In the book, that spine is both technical and symbolic: high-speed rail, pedestrian circulation, utilities, energy distribution, civic access, and the shared metabolic infrastructure of the city are concentrated into a single linear system. The inhabited modules attach to it. Growth proceeds along it. The landscape outside it remains legible because the city has not spilled everywhere at once.

This is the crucial difference between a linear city and sprawl. Sprawl also grows outward, but it does so by multiplying roads, pipes, wires, parking lots, and private parcels in every direction. The lean linear form grows by intensifying a corridor. It accepts length while refusing dispersal. It says: if the city must extend, let it extend along a shared artery rather than dissolve into an asphalt mist.

It's the stuff of science fiction dreams. But in Saudi Arabia, it served as a foundation for a real-life megaproject: Neom. Here's a video introduction:

But it turned out to be a lot harder to execute than to draw up. The ambitious project has been severely scaled back. Matt Bevan of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News looks at what happened to the city of the future in the following 13-and-a-half minute video:

That report was in 2024. But is "The Line", as the Neom megaproject is known, really dead? The two percent of the project that wasn't defunded is still going forward. Here's The B1M's video report on the city's project from December 2025, which digs into the construction challenges of actually building the linear city:

As conceived, the linear city is a bold vision of what the city of the future could be. Given the challenges of making the project viable, it might always be.

In the United States, when people talk about mortgages, they almost invariably are talking about the 30-year fixed-rate conventional mortgage.

It wasn't always that way. In fact, it wasn't until the Housing Act of 1954 became law that the 30-year fixed rate mortgage became mainstream. The law's "combination of federal insurance and full amortization requirements made the extended timeline financially safe for banks". Soon after, the 30-year fixed rate conventional mortgage became the default for both lenders and home buyers.

But it wasn't until much later that federally-backed agencies like Freddie Mac began keeping regular track of what the average monthly interest rate was for homes bought in the U.S. with these mortgages. As important as they are for prospective American homeowners, the historical data for these mortgages only goes back to April 1971. Freddie Mac, officially known as Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, has maintained weekly data for mortgages extending back to that month. The government-sponsored enterprise also used to report monthly averages for mortgage rates from April 1971 forward, but discontinued the practice after December 2022.

And yet, because housing sales and prices are reported on a monthly basis, it's incredibly useful to have mortgage rates averaged over the period of a month. Since Freddie Mac isn't doing that job any more, we took it over and have made it publicly available.

It's built into the following interactive chart, which we've just updated to visualize 55 years worth of the average monthly interest rates for 30-year conventional mortgages in the U.S.

The average 30-year fixed-rate conventional mortgage was 6.33% in April 2026.

References

Freddie Mac. 30-Year Fixed Rate Mortgages Since 1971. [Online Database]. Accessed 15 May 2026. Note: Starting from December 2022, the estimated monthly mortgage rate is taken as the average of weekly 30-year conventional mortgage rates recorded during the month.

Image credit: Mortgage Payment Due date by alanharder.ca via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0).

The outlook for the quarterly dividends of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) has substantially improved in the month since our previous snapshot?

Here is our summary of how the outlook for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends per share changed since our 15 April 2026 snapshot:

• 2026-Q2: Increase of $0.04 to $19.81 per share
• 2026-Q3: Increase of $0.46 to $20.94 per share
• 2026-Q4: Increase of $0.47 to $20.85 per share
• 2027-Q1: Increase of $0.40 to $22.14 per share
• 2027-Q2: Increase of $1.13 to $21.19 per share

The following chart shows how expectations for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends per share changed in the month from 15 April 2026 to 15 May 2026.

The large change in the forecast value for the most distant future quarter of 2027-Q2 is typical of the kind of volatility we see in dividend futures after the data for a new quarter first becomes available. Based on just the increases seen for all the other future quarters however, May 2026 saw one of the strongest month-over-month improvements in the S&P 500's dividend outlook in years.

Ready to find out more about dividend futures data? If this is your first exposure to the S&P 500's quarterly dividend futures, be sure to read the following section that explains what this data is communicating about the future for the index' dividends.

More About Dividend Futures Data

For this series, we take a snapshot of the CME Group's S&P 500 quarterly dividend futures data shortly after the second or third week of each month.

Dividend futures indicate the amount of dividends per share to be paid out over the period covered by each quarter's dividend futures contracts, which start on the day after the preceding quarter's dividend futures contracts expire and end on the third Friday of the month ending the indicated quarter. For example, as determined by dividend futures contracts, the now "current" quarter of 2026-Q2 began on Saturday, 21 March 2026 and will end on Friday, 19 June 2026. Since the expectations for this quarter's dividend payouts can change all the way up to that final date, it qualifies as a future quarter.

Because dividend futures are tied to options contracts that run on this schedule, that makes these figures different from the quarterly dividends per share figures that are reported by Standard and Poor. S&P reports the amount of dividends per share paid out during regular calendar quarters after the end of each quarter. This term mismatch accounts for the differences in dividends reported by both sources, with the biggest differences between the two typically seen in the first and fourth quarters of each year.

Dividend futures data is important for more than just what they project will be a future quarter's dividend payout. They represent the quantified expectations investors have for the future income they will realize from holding their investments, which in turn, affects how investors set current day stock prices. How changes in the outlook for dividends at specific points of time in the future contribute to changes in current day stock prices is described by this math.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "A crystal ball with the word 'SP 500' written inside it". And 'Dividends' written above it, which we added.

The S&P 500 (Index: SPX) continued rising during the trading week ending on Friday, 15 May 2026, clocking several new record high closes during the week that was. The index however retreated from those new highs on Friday, but still closed at 7,408.50, up a little over 0.1% above its previous week's close.

Friday was the day inflation fears came roaring back for the U.S. economy, erasing two days worth of gains for the index in the process and taking expectations of rate cuts entirely off the table for 2026.

The CME Group's FedWatch Tool now anticipates no change in the Federal Funds Rate until 9 December (2026-Q4), when it now projects a quarter point rate hike, which is a big change from the previous week. Right now, it's not projecting much more than that increase, but the tool's bias going into 2027 has shifted toward expectations of more rate hikes.

QTR's Fringe Finance captured the Wall Street zeitgeist of the moment:

Lauren Hyslop, investment manager at Mattioli Woods, summarized the situation well in comments to CNBC: “Rising bond yields are once again imposing their will on markets, tightening financial conditions and sapping risk appetite across asset classes,” she said.

She added that investors are confronting the “uncomfortable reality of ‘higher for longer’ rates in the U.S., as stubborn inflation and surprisingly resilient growth push back any meaningful pivot to easing.” She also noted that a stronger dollar, fading expectations for liquidity support, geopolitical uncertainty, and fiscal concerns are all adding pressure simultaneously. That combination is particularly dangerous because it removes the easy narrative markets have relied on for months that rate cuts were inevitable and policymakers would remain quick to intervene.

The fact that the Fed is stuck between a 3.8% CPI and 6% PPI rock and a market-teetering-on-the-brink-of violently-pulling-back hard place was the core of yesterday’s concern. If the bond market starts to get violent, what options does the Fed have to start printing to buy bonds and do yield curve control with inflation already where it is? The central bank’s hands might be tied — and this is a scary (and somewhat unprecedented) thought....

Even so, the latest update of the alternative futures chart shows the trajectory of the S&P 500 remains within the redzone forecast range we forecast for it almost three months ago following the disruption of the Iran war geopolitical event.

The change from being biased to either holding rates steady or cutting rates is a global response to inflation pressures and the disruptions from the Iran war geopolitical event. The market moving headlines of the week indicate they are increasingly expected in the U.S., in Japan, and also in the Eurozone:

Monday, 11 May 2026

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• US home sales edge up in April but affordability remains a challenge
• Oil prices settle higher after Trump says Iran ceasefire "on life support"
• Inflation reading Tuesday expected to show prices at nearly a three-year high
• Bigger trouble developing in and out of China:
• China's marriages drop to decade low, deepening demographic concerns
• China's car sales drop for seventh month in April; exports roar
• China April exports rebound strongly, trade surplus widens ahead of Trump visit
• ECB minions thinking more about ditching their perfect monetary policy:
• ECB's Kocher sees rate move if inflation outlook does not improve
• ECB's de Guindos urges prudence on rates in parting shot - FT
• Wall Street ends slightly higher as U.S.-Iran resolution talks fizzle
• Wall St inches to higher close, AI fervor edges out Iran impasse

Tuesday, 12 May 2026

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• US annual consumer inflation accelerates amid broad increase in prices
• Core CPI heats up in April; headline CPI rises in line with consensus
• VIEW April CPI rises more than expected; bond yields climb
• Oil prices jump on latest US-Iran peace process impasse
• Fed minions get closer to having a new chief:
• Senate confirms Warsh to Fed Board, with Fed chair vote likely Wednesday
• Bigger trouble developing in China:
• China's US ethane imports hit record as Iran war cut rival feedstock supply
• China's commodity imports show Hormuz impact as oil slides, metals rise
• BOJ minions discussing plans for next rate hike, working to prop up Japan's currency:
• BOJ debated near term rate hike at April meeting, opening door to June move
• US, Japan agree excess FX volatility undesirable, Bessent says
• S&P 500, Nasdaq end lower as inflation, Iran tensions weigh
• Wall Street ended mostly lower after a hotter CPI print landed

Wednesday, 13 May 2026

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• US producer prices surprise with largest increase in four years
• Trump, Xi to weigh tariff cuts on $30 billion of imports in managed trade push
• Oil settles lower on US rate hike fears; investors watch Trump-Xi meeting
• Fed minions claim they want to get inflation down, perhaps even to their real target:
• Fed is 'dead serious' about getting inflation down, Kashkari says
• Background:
• What Is the Fed's Real Inflation Target?
• ECB minions expected to ditch perfect monetary policy and hike rates in June, starting to worry about AI cyberattacks:
• ECB to hike rates in June and at least once more on war-led inflation spike: Reuters poll
• ECB urges banks to quickly prepare for AI-assisted cyberattacks
• S&P 500, Nasdaq boosted by chips to record closing highs
• Wall Street ended mostly higher despite a hotter than forecasted PPI inflation print

Thursday, 14 May 2026

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Trump lands in China for Xi summit with Nvidia CEO in tow
• CEOs join Trump in China where AI will take priority over trade deals
• Trade wars to extended truce: Analysts expect ‘stabilization’ in U.S.-China ties as Trump-Xi meet
• Xi asks Trump if U.S. and China can avoid ‘Thucydides Trap’ at high-stakes summit
• Explained: The ‘Thucydides Trap’ referenced at the Trump-Xi Summit
• Oil prices dip after Iran says dozens of vessels are crossing Hormuz
• Fed minions starting to think inflation may be problem for US economy; job opening for new minions opens up:  
• Inflation is most 'pressing risk' to US economy, Fed's Schmid says
• Fed Governor Miran submits resignation, throws support behind Warsh as new chair
• Deregulation could ease inflation pressures, Fed’s Miran says - CNBC interview
• BOJ minions getting super excited to hike Japan's interest rates:
• https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/boj-board-member-masu-calls-early-rate-hike-2026-05-14/
• Wall Street finished higher as the S&P 500 tagged 7,500
• Wall Street ends higher on tech rally; investors eye Beijing talks

Friday, 15 May 2026

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• US And China Agree To Establish Trade And Investment Boards As Trump-Xi Summit Delivers Modest Wins
• Trump Touts ‘Fantastic Trade Deals’ With China, but Details Are Scarce
• Trump says China to buy 200 Boeing jets, order could rise up to 750
• China signals tariff cuts, advances in farm market access after Trump-Xi summit
• Yields surge to one-year high as oil prices and inflation data rattle markets
• Next chief Fed minion's plan to reduce holdings of U.S. government debt to come up against government's need to borrow much more:
• US debt load could undercut Warsh's plan to shrink Fed balance sheet
• Bigger rate hikes developing in Japan:
• BOJ expected to raise rates to 1.0% in June, hike again in October-December
• S&P 500 holds weekly gains despite Friday selloff
• Wall Street ends lower on mounting inflation worries
• How SpaceX stacks up against some of the biggest US IPOs

The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow toolestimate of real GDP growth for the U.S. economy in the current quarter of 2026-Q2 rose to +4.0%, up from the +3.7% it projected a week earlier.

Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull and bear who are shocked and scared by a news report that says 'INFLATION IS BACK, BABY!'"