The City of Dallas has become one of the premier business hubs in the country, and a new report shows that the residents living and working in the DFW metroplex are paying more than the national average to live here.
Dallas residents pay 9.8% or $2,413 more than the national average in household bills each year, which equates to about 43% of residents’ income, according to a 2023 report from bill payment services company doxo.
Dallas households pay an average of $2,248 per month or $26,970 per year for the ten most common household bills, local data from doxo shows.
The ten most common household expenses in Dallas are mortgages ($1,967), rent ($1,220), auto loans ($535), utilities ($304), auto insurance ($188), mobile phones ($114), cable and internet ($112), health insurance ($74), life insurance ($101), and security ($78).
“Housing tends to be what drives up the cost of living in cities across the US, and this indeed tracks for Dallas, where both Mortgage and Rent are well above the national average,” Senior Director of Insights Liz Powell at doxo told The Dallas Express.
“Another category that tends to drive up the cost of living is Auto Loans,” Powell said. “In Dallas, residents pay an average of $535 compared to the national average of $467 per month. This usually indicates that people in the area tend to buy nicer and/or bigger cars that have more expensive loans,” she explained.
At the national level, the average American spends an average of $29,459 per year on all household bills and $24,557 on the ten most essential household bills. This equates to approximately $3.87 trillion each year in household bills, with roughly 82% or $3.22 trillion going toward the ten main categories, according to the report.
Even though local households pay about 10% more per year than the national average and 6.1% more than the state average, Dallas actually ranked No. 72 most expensive out of 247 compared to other major metros in Texas.
Household bills in Dallas make up a smaller portion of annual expenses relative to cities in North Texas like McKinney, which ranked No. 57, Addison (No. 47), Irving (No. 38), Plano (No. 27), Richardson (No. 12), Frisco (No. 8), and Southlake (No. 1).
When it comes to negotiating the fairest rates and being able to shrink overall household expenses, Powell believes it’s crucial for consumers to be armed with the facts.
“The best way for consumers to understand whether or not they are getting the best deal is to know how much they should or could be paying for their bills,” Powell told The Dallas Express. “With doxo’s Insights program, we strive to make this information transparent by providing national and regional averages across the ten most common household bill pay categories.”
To provide the information, doxo analyzes aggregate bill payment data for 97% of U.S. zip codes. For each city that is observed, doxo calculates the monthly expenses from the ten most common household bills to determine the average amount paid in each category.
