Study: Even Apple and Google engineers can’t really afford to live near their offices

February 14, 2018

That’s according to the Y Combinator-backed real-estate startup Open Listings, which looked at median home sales prices near the headquarters (meaning within a 20-minute commute) of some of the Bay Area’s biggest and best-known tech companies. Using public salary data from Paysa, Open Listings then looked at how many software engineers from those companies could actually afford to buy a house close to their office. Here’s what it found:

Engineers at five major SF-based tech companies would need to spend over the 28% threshold of their income to afford a monthly mortgage near their offices.
Apple engineers would have to pay an average of 33% of their monthly income for a mortgage near work. That’s the highest percentage of the companies analyzed, and home prices in Cupertino continue to skyrocket.
Google wasn’t much better at 32%, and living near the Facebook office would cost an engineer 29% of their monthly paycheck. (The companies are headquartered in Mountain View and Menlo Park, respectively.)
Across the Bay Area, the median cost for houses near the companies analyzed was $1,203,750. The median salary for software engineers at those companies was $210,500.
Source: Open Listings, Paysa