Why is everything so expensive?

Shelter

The house outran pay. The payment hid it.

A new house took 4.5 years of the average worker’s pay in 1980. It takes 5.8 now. The median new-house price grew 1.24× as fast as pay, but the monthly payment on it grew only 0.74×, because mortgage rates fell from 12.9% in January 1980 to 6.9% in September 2026. Cheap money carried the house for forty years. The down payment never got that help.

The payment is what people feel each month, so hold it up against income. A new buyer’s payment on the median new house took 41% of the median household’s income in 1980 and 48.5% in 1981, when rates passed 16%. It bottomed at 19.8% in 2020. In 2025 it took 29.1%: more than any year from the late 1990s through 2021, less than the early 1980s. HUD calls a household cost-burdened past 30%, and HUD counts taxes, insurance and utilities, which this line leaves out.

Rent, the Census median including utilities, ran 1.39×. Home insurance ran 1.66× since 2000. The utility bills went the other way: electricity 0.92×, natural gas 0.88×.

Health

The biggest winner is the bill most people never see.

Employer health coverage costs 2.73× as much per person, measured against pay, as it did in 1987, the first year the government counts it (CMS, employer and worker shares together). KFF puts the average family premium at $26,993 in 2025. At the average wage that’s 21 weeks of work. The worker’s share is $6,850; the employer pays the rest, out of money that could have been wages. Part of why paychecks grew slower is that this grew faster.

Medical care overall, the prices of visits, drugs and hospital stays, ran 1.67×.

Transportation

The same car got cheaper. Nobody buys the same car.

Price a car of fixed quality and it grew only 0.42× as fast as pay; that’s the government’s index. Price what people actually drove off the lot and it ran 1.40×. The average new vehicle took 27.6 weeks of pay in 1980 and 38.8 weeks in September 2026. The difference is the truck: light trucks and SUVs were 19.8% of new sales in January 1980 and 84.2% in September 2026.

Insuring it ran 2.17×. Filling it didn’t: gasoline grew 0.78× as fast as pay, and a used vehicle 0.63×. The rest of this site is about that gallon; here is why it costs what it does this week.

Education

The sticker ran away. The bill, less so.

Published tuition and fees at four-year colleges grew 2.54× as fast as pay since 1980 (NCES). That’s the price on the website. After grants it looks different: the College Board puts average net tuition at public four-year schools around $2,300 for 2025-26, against a published $11,950, and below its 2012-13 peak in real terms. The sticker outran pay. For a lot of families the bill has stopped running.

Food

Groceries lost the race.

Food at home grew 0.77× as fast as pay since 1980; eating out, 1.00×, almost exactly even. Eggs and beef spiked, and the 2022 jump was real, but across forty-six years the cart got cheaper in work time. The staples, one by one, are on the home page.

So why does it feel like everything?

Because the winners are the big, lumpy bills.

Look at which side each cost landed on. The ones that outran pay are large and hard to skip: a premium, a tuition bill, a down payment, a car, the insurance on both. You pay them in chunks, and each one lands as a shock. The ones that fell behind are small and frequent, a tank of gas or a week of groceries, and nobody celebrates a cheaper week. Averages hide the rest: a renter in a hot city or a family buying its own coverage lives on the steep side of every one of these lines.