How much money does a family need to get by where you live?

We talk a fair amount about what people earn. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, or $15,080 for a year of full-time work. Workers are organizing to demand $15 an hour, or $31,200 a year. The median household income is around $52,000. To be in the top one percent of households, you need $385,195 in income. But we need to put those numbers in the context of what people need.

That minimum wage? It's not enough to pay rent on an average one- or two-bedroom apartment in any state. But the median household income falls short of living costs in many places, as a new report from the Economic Policy Institute shows.

• The basic family budget for a two-parent, two-child family ranges from $49,114 (Morristown, Tenn.) to $106,493 (Washington, D.C.). In the median family budget area for this family type, Des Moines, Iowa, a two-parent, two-child family needs $63,741 to secure an adequate but modest living standard. This is well above the 2014 poverty threshold of $24,008 for this family type.
• For a two-parent, two-child household, housing ranges from 10.2 percent of a family’s budget in Binghamton, N.Y., to 25.6 percent in San Francisco. Housing for this family type is most expensive in San Francisco ($1,956 per month), and is least expensive in Franklin, Poinsett, and Grant counties in Arkansas ($561 per month).
• Across regions and family types, child care costs account for the greatest variability in family budgets. Monthly child care costs for a two-parent, one-child household range from $344 in rural South Carolina to $1,472 in Washington, D.C. In the latter, monthly child care costs for a two-parent, three-child household are $2,784—nearly 90 percent higher than for a two-parent, one-child household.
• Among two-parent, two-child families, child care costs exceed rent in 500 out of 618 family budget areas.

Household income is often higher in the more expensive places to live, of course. In the Washington, DC, metro area in 2013, it was $90,149. But that means that more than half of families fell short of what was needed to support a basic but stable lifestyle; the EPI calculated its budgets using rents at the 40th percentile and the second-least-expensive food plan the USDA outlines, to give a sense of what type of budget we're talking about. What that means is that many, many families in this country are cutting basic corners because their incomes don't keep up with the cost of living—and no wonder, since the cost of living keeps rising while incomes stagnate.

Check out the EPI's family budget calculator to see basic living costs for families in your area.