Methuen, Massachusetts

Unemployment of 4.6% is lower than 39% of the 3,904 measured US cities.

Employment fell 1.7% over the past year, to 28,014 employed residents.

31% of adults hold a four-year degree, higher than 71% of measured US cities.

Household income is higher than at least 87% of measured US cities.

Median rent of $1,749 takes 19% of median household income, below the 30% threshold at which a household is considered cost-burdened.

A median home costs 4.4 times median household income here, above the historic benchmark of about three times income.

Both affordability measures come from the same ACS release as the income they are compared with, so the comparison is like for like. They describe housing cost against local earnings and are not a cost-of-living index — transport, groceries, healthcare, insurance and taxes are not included, and a place can look affordable here and still be expensive to live in for reasons this does not capture.

5 of the twelve months have a normal average temperature between 55°F and 80°F. July averages a high of 83°F and January a low of 19°F.

Normal annual precipitation is 40.9 inches.

Climate figures are thirty-year normals, not current conditions. They describe what a typical year looks like rather than what the weather is doing today.

Three things people look for are missing from every AreaProfile page, and each is missing for a reason rather than by oversight. The Area Score is calculated without them and the weighting is documented on the methodology page.

Crime

The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer is the only source with national coverage and a published method, and it requires an API key AreaProfile does not hold. Arrest counts, news volume and commercial “safety scores” are not substituted in the meantime. Reported crime is also easy to misread: agency participation varies year to year, and a city that draws a large daytime workforce carries incidents its residents did not generate.

Taxes

No tax dataset has met the source admission test for coverage, transparent methodology and update cadence. Nothing here is individualized tax advice.

Full cost of living

No public source publishes one with national coverage and a documented method. Housing affordability above is computed from published rent, price and income, and excludes transport, groceries, healthcare, insurance and taxes — commuting cost in particular tends to offset suburban housing savings.

Put Methuen side by side with a similar place.

Profile recalculated August 30, 2026. Recalculation is not the same as new source data — each figure above shows the period its source actually covers. Read the full methodology or browse every source.