Comparison of Cost of Living Based Real Income in Georgia

We calculated the cost of living in 10 cities in Georgia – Athens, Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, Dalton, Douglasville, Dublin, Savannah, Statesboro, and Valdosta – by the data collected by the collaboration of the Council for Community and Economic Research (C2ER) and the University of North Georgia.  We found that the cost of living in Athens is slightly lower (2~6%) than Augusta, Dalton, Douglasville, Dublin although the variation in the cost of living in Georgia is within 9% at most.

Given the small variation in the cost of living, we developed the cost-of-living based real income as the ratio of income to the cost of living (COL), i.e., income / COL. By using  median household income from U.S. Census data, we calculated the COL based real income in 2023. By comparing the COL based real incomes, we found that Atlanta has the highest COL-based real income by which its income is 25.7% higher than that of Athens. Athens has a similar COL based real income to Dalton and Douglasville, but higher income than Columbus (23%), Dublin (28%), Statesboro (23%), and Valdosta (20%). We discovered that the difference in real income among cities comes from the difference in nominal income rather than the difference in the cost of living.