Zillow study: how much parents need to buy a home in San Diego

SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) -- New homeowners in San Diego, particularly those with children, would have to put an exceedingly large percentage of their income toward mortgage and childcare costs, according to a new Zillow study.

Put simply, parents looking to buy a house locally are faced with a major cost burden. Researchers at the popular real-estate marketplace company took on the task of figuring out just how heavy the financial weight is for parents that want to own a home in San Diego and other large metros across the U.S.

When analyzing the data, Zillow looked at the National Database of Childcare Prices, released by the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, which contains county-level weekly childcare prices from 2008 to 2018 with estimates for households with full-time childcare needs.

The researchers also reviewed Childcare Aware released estimates for average annual childcare costs from 2017 to 2022.

Using both of these datasets, Zillow estimated metro and state-level childcare costs from 2009 to 2022 for the typical family with 1.94 children, at the height of the family’s challenge: when “both” of those kids would be small children in daycare.

"We did this by taking the average across each metro’s member counties in 2016 (the largest sample year), weighting the contribution of each county by the number of households with kids younger than age 6 and with either two working parents or a single working parent (also in the National Database of Childcare Prices)," Zillow explained in an article highlighting their research.

More on the company's methodology can be reviewed here.

Based on this study, families in San Diego would need to spend a whooping 113% of their household income to afford their mortgage and child care. This is with a median income of $93,077, an average mortgage payment of $5,161, and the annual cost of child care for 1.94 toddlers costing $29,387, according to Zillow.

The study showed that prospective homebuyers with children in other expensive California metros also need to spend an outsized percentage of their income. Parents in Los Angeles would need to dish out 121% of the median household income and those in San Francisco would need to spend 106%.

The question that remains for many parents who wish to own a home: how is that possible?

The full study and list of large U.S. metros included in Zillow's study can be found here.