Salary for Two
I did the math. The math needs a roommate — or a lover.
I saw a reporter job in California a few weeks ago. The salary range was $65,000 to $90,000. Good outlet. Interesting beat.
Then I did the math.
A livable one-bedroom in Los Angeles — not luxurious, just one you can sign for without checking crime maps first — runs about $2,400 a month. Call it $2,500 to be safe. That is $30,000 a year in rent. Add federal and state taxes on a $100,000 salary in California and take-home drops to roughly $72,000. Subtract rent and you are at $42,000 for the year. Then come student loans, car expenses, health insurance if the plan is weak, groceries at Los Angeles prices, a phone bill, internet, and the occasional parking ticket because the signs on La Brea were stacked four deep and you still guessed wrong.
I know that salary looks good on paper. It looks different on a lease application in Los Angeles.
Every time I see a salary attached to a major city, I find myself running the same equation. The equation works best if there is someone else on the lease.
I closed the tab.
I feel the same about a job that posts in New York for similar salaries. My first thought is no longer about the work. It’s who is living in New York on that salary? Like really, living. Going out to eat on a Wednesday because you feel like it. Picking up a niche hobby without opening a spreadsheet first. Having a Beyoncé fund (yes, people have those!) — the albums, the concert tickets, the plane ticket, the hotel room, the merch — and not feeling irresponsible for it.
I do not think people should only be able to survive. I want to do good work, and when I clock out I want a life that is not entirely organized around earning the right to keep living indoors. Many people would say $85,000 is a great salary and people should make it work. But “making it work” in a major American city, alone, increasingly means one thing. Finding someone to split it with.
According to SmartAsset, a single person needs to earn at least $136,000 to live comfortably in New York City. In San Francisco, it is over $120,000. Across the hundred largest cities in the country, the floor for comfortable single living is roughly $85,000, and that is in Indianapolis, the cheapest city on the list.
The Economist publishes something called the Carrie Bradshaw Index, named after the fictional HBO character from Sex and the City who famously lived alone in Manhattan on a writer’s salary. It ranks 100 U.S. cities by how affordable they are for a single person renting a studio on one income. Last year, 41 cities fell below the affordability line. The year before, it was 38. The year before that, 35.
I am almost 44 years old. I am not interested in having a roommate. Some people are, and that is fine. But I like coming home to a quiet apartment where no one else’s guests are in the living room and no one else’s habits are competing with mine. That is not extravagance. That is the baseline.
A Redfin survey from late 2025 found that 64% of single Americans struggle to afford housing, compared with 39% of married people. Zillow data shows that a single person living alone in a one-bedroom spends nearly $7,000 more per year than a couple splitting the same space. In New York, that gap reaches $19,500.
Economists call this the singles tax: The added cost of housing, food, transportation, and insurance that single people absorb because there is no one to split them with. It sounds small, but what it actually describes is the distance between the life you were told a salary could buy and the life that salary can now support.
On Reddit’s r/jobs forum, one user in his early 30s wrote that being single as an adult now feels less like a normal stage of life than a privilege. He said he would need to be exceptionally good in his field to live alone on a middle-class salary, or else marry another high earner. Then he added, “I’ve never thought of dating as a business endeavor, but now I’m having second thoughts.”
A divorced woman in the same thread wrote that most of her peers are married and living a lifestyle she cannot touch on one income. They either forgot what it is like to live on one salary, she said, or never knew because they paired off early enough to skip the lesson.
A woman in her 30s, single, no children, mid-range income, put it more plainly. “It seems society is only geared towards being able to move through life with a partner,” she wrote. “All I want is to be able to afford a home independently.”
In one Reddit thread, a woman described being denied a raise after a promotion because her manager assumed her fiancé’s IT salary covered the household. Why would we give you a raise, the manager asked, you definitely do not need it. Her fiancé, meanwhile, got a raise when they got engaged. He had a family to support.
On r/careerguidance, another woman described her first job offer out of college in Boston. The salary was so low she went back to the recruiter and asked if it was normal. The recruiter’s advice was to find a roommate on Craigslist.
There is a whole category of modern adulthood that now gets framed as a personal choice when it is really a budgeting strategy. Living alone. Staying single. Wanting quiet. Refusing roommates in your 30s or 40s. These get treated like preferences with a price attached, sort of like small luxuries for people who insist on doing life the expensive way.
But independence is not a luxury category. Or it shouldn’t be. The takeaway for me is that a plus-one is no longer a romantic variable. It is an economic one.
This math gets worse when you add race. I am a Black man and that changes the numbers.
A 2025 Redfin analysis found that 32% of Black millennials own their homes, compared with 67% of white millennials. The typical Black worker earns 79 cents for every dollar a white worker makes. For every $100 in wealth held by white households, Black households hold $15. An Urban Institute study found that parental wealth and homeownership explain a meaningful share of the racial homeownership gap, and that 51% of white parents have wealth above $200,000, compared with 10% of Black parents.
So when I look at a salary and think this only works if there are two of us, I’m also thinking about the fact that “two of us” still might not be enough. The down payment help, the co-signer, the inheritance that carries someone through a transition, the family home that has appreciated for decades — none of that is evenly distributed.
That is also why the No Buy movement caught my attention.
Millions of people, mostly millennials, pledged to stop buying anything nonessential last year and for all 2026. No new clothes. No takeout. No impulse purchases. It’s packaged as lifestyle discipline, minimalism with a hashtag, and a cleaner relationship to consumption.
But a Bankrate report suggested something more familiar beneath it. High inflation, stagnant wages, and rising costs have made the trend feel less like self-optimization than adaptation. A millennial working as both an analyst and a part-time grocery store worker told The Wall Street Journal that when you cannot control what stores charge, you control how you spend.
That sounds right to me. When the salary does not stretch, austerity gets recast as character. You call it discipline. You make a spreadsheet. You shrink your life until it fits the numbers.
The deeper question — why the numbers require that much shrinking in the first place — stays right where it was.
A few months ago I was reading another Reddit thread where someone asked how millennials are affording their lives. One of the top comments said, “I don’t understand how anyone bought a house recently or is raising a child right now. Me and my partner can’t afford either.”
They could not afford a house or a child.
And they already had a partner.
They were already two.
I think about the version of adulthood where you work hard and the life that follows: the apartment, the savings, the ability to say yes to something without doing math first. That version never mentioned that the numbers required a second person.
The Beyoncé fund will have to wait. ⁂
