A six-figure salary is considered low-income in a handful of California counties, according to the 2026 income limits set by the state’s Department of Housing & Community Development.
These new income limits, which took effect June 23, are used to calculate the cost of affordable housing for certain state housing assistance programs.
Most counties saw an increase in the cutoff for what is considered low-income, and seven counties—Santa Cruz, San Francisco, San Mateo, Marin, Santa Clara, Orange, and Santa Barbara—had their cutoffs set at six-figure amounts.
Santa Cruz County has the highest cutoff, with a limit set at $122,200 for a single-person household. This is a nearly 10 percent increase from the previous year, which set the low-income cutoff at $111,100.
For each additional person added to the household, the income cutoff is adjusted so that “income limits should be higher for larger families and lower for smaller families,” the Department of Housing & Community Development wrote in its memo.
Following Santa Cruz are three more coastal counties: San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin. These three counties have cutoffs of $117,700 for single-person households, which is also an increase from the previous year’s limit of $109,700.
The low-income limit in Santa Clara is set at $113,700 for single-person households, and in Santa Barbara it is set at $102,000.
Two counties, however, are maintaining their low-income cutoffs from last year. Solano County will continue to use $76,950 as its limit, and Shasta will continue to use $54,500.
These figures come as housing and affordability remain top issues for residents.
“California home prices continue to be much more expensive than the rest of the US,” the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) reported in its 2026 Housing Affordability Tracker.
A mid-tier home, or the average-value middle-market property, costs around $775,000 in California, according to the LAO. That’s nearly double the national average of $398,771 for a mid-tier house, according to Redfin.
The Golden State saw a rapid home price increase of 14 percent per year during the pandemic from 2020 to 2022, the LAO stated. But home price growth has slowed down since then. The average price of a mid-tier home is currently increasing by approximately 1 percent per year.
“While home prices have stabilized, housing has become less affordable for most Californians in recent years” due to incomes failing to keep pace with the increase in housing costs, the LAO added.
As a result, only about 23 percent of households would qualify for mid-tier home mortgages in 2026, down from roughly 31 percent in 2019.
The state’s low homeownership and higher-than-average rental costs and home values were also noted in a recent report by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), which said the state “has a housing problem.”
“Homeownership is the second lowest in the nation, and housing has become a dominant reason people leave the state,” the report states. “Two of every three Californians say the cost of housing is a ‘big problem’ in their part of California.”
Ownership is particularly low among young adults, with about 31 percent of people between 30 and 34 years old reporting owning their own home. The national average for homeownership among that age group is about 49 percent.
Rental costs in California also exceed the national average by about 40 percent, the PPIC reported. The average cost to rent is about $2,159 in California compared with the national average of $1,526.
The PPIC noted that coastal cities face the highest costs, and large numbers of people are relocating inland, where costs are lower but housing supply struggles to keep up with demand.
