The 10 Most Affordable States to Buy a Home

This story originally appeared on SmartAsset.com.

Owning a home is a major goal for many people across the U.S. Securing a mortgage and buying that home, though, can be difficult to achieve.

According to a June 2020 Home Values report from Zillow, the median home value in the U.S. is $248,857, an uptick of 4% over the past year. Though values are expected to fall about 1.5% in the year ahead, just how much you’ll be spending largely depends on where you’re living.

That’s why SmartAsset crunched the numbers for the 2020 edition of our study on the cheapest states to buy a home. To find the cheapest states to buy a home, we analyzed data for all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C., across the following five metrics:

• Effective property tax rate. The data comes from the Census Bureau’s 2018 one-year American Community Survey.
• Median listing price. The data comes from Zillow and is for January 2020.
• Median listing price per square foot. The data comes from Zillow and is for January 2020.
• Median value of the bottom one-third of the market. This is the median value for all homes in the bottom third of home values in the state. The data comes from Zillow and is for January 2020.
• Average closing costs. The data is from SmartAsset’s closing costs calculator and is for March 2020.

First, we ranked each state according to each metric. Then we found the average ranking for each state, assigning each metric an equal weight. We used these average rankings to determine our final score. The state with the highest average ranking received a score of 100. The state with the lowest average ranking received a score of 0.

Following are the results.

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