The Worst Cities for Retirement Stress

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Some cities that sound like great places to retire may cost too much for the older people who live there and may provide poor support services.

That’s one takeaway from a simple U.S. metropolitan area retirement stress ranking we created using a combination of the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 American Community Survey income, housing and geographical mobility and 2020 health data and health data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.

In our index, lower scores were better than higher scores. The 90 metropolitan areas we rated received stress scores ranging from 14.3, in the Salisbury, Maryland, area, which has been showing up on many lists of retiree magnets, up to more than 70 in two places in the Midwest.

For a look at the 12 metropolitan areas with the worst scores, see the gallery above.

For a selection of the data used to compile the stress scores for all 90 communities, see the table below.

What it means: Of course, financial professionals and their clients have to take any list like this with a bucketful of salt. We all have our own ideas of what would and would not be a nice place to live.

Thanks to all of the data streams federal agencies now post on the web, you can feed public domain government data into your favorite spreadsheet software and create rankings that fit your own ideas and your clients’ ideas about where to go later in life.

Methodology: We first compiled data for each area’s overall income, retirement income, median housing costs and percentage of older residents who rent and spend more than 30% of household income on rent.

To get a health status indicator for older people that’s available at the metropolitan statistical area level, we used the CDC’s statistics on the percentage of people ages 65 and older who lack natural teeth.

Some people who lose their teeth may simply be unlucky, but high rates of loss of all teeth in a community may be a sign of problems with that community’s health care services and other support services.

We ranked each community from 1 to 90 for each indicator included, with 1 being the best score and 90 the worst, then came up with the stress scores by averaging the rankings.

For the percentage of older residents who have moved to the community recently, income and the ratio of retirement income to average community income, the areas with the highest numbers ranked No. 1.

For housing costs, the ratio of housing costs to income and the percentage of older residents with no natural teeth, the communities with the lowest numbers ranked No. 1.

We included all metropolitan areas that had complete sets of data in the Census Bureau income, housing and geographical mobility tables and data on lack of natural teeth in the CDC’s 2020 survey results.

Retirement Stress Scores by Metro Area

Credit: Adobe Stock

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