How does Retirement Lists estimate housing costs?

For an eligible U.S. destination, Retirement Lists follows a fixed source order.

The preferred source is the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey five-year estimate for median gross rent by bedroom count.

The one-bedroom cell supplies the housing anchor for Local and Traveler. The two-bedroom cell supplies the Couple anchor.

Most applicable rows in the checked artifact use Census place geography. Census places include incorporated places and census-designated places; they should not all be described as cities or municipal boundaries. The artifact also contains five eligible county-subdivision rows. Public labels must describe the actual source geography without turning an internal eligibility classification into a boundary claim.

An ACS value is a geographic planning estimate. It is not a current advertised rent, neighborhood estimate, lease quote, or available-unit observation.

If the applicable ACS bedroom cell is unavailable, Retirement Lists may use the corresponding one- or two-bedroom value from HUD’s revised FY2026 Fair Market Rent workbook.

HUD Fair Market Rent is a 40th-percentile gross-rent estimate for a metropolitan FMR area or nonmetropolitan county. It is not city rent. Any HUD fallback must be labeled as broader than the named destination.

The fallback is allowed only when Retirement Lists can reproduce the correct geographic assignment and find the applicable workbook row. A HUD value may be displayed as broader-area context, but it is not direct destination-grain decision evidence.

If the required ACS value is unavailable and Retirement Lists cannot reproduce the applicable HUD geography or find the required workbook value, the housing input remains unavailable.

Retirement Lists never assigns a nearby county, metropolitan area, or other FMR area arbitrarily.

ACS and HUD gross-rent anchors include applicable tenant-paid utilities. When either source supplies the housing anchor, the standardized budget adds $0 as a separate utility amount.

A separate utility reference may still appear as context, but it is not added to the same budget again. This prevents applicable utilities from being counted twice.

This verified gross-rent rule applies to the U.S. ACS and HUD anchors. Country-specific modeled profiles are not relabeled as U.S.-style gross rent, and this page does not imply that every country profile has the same utility composition.

Portugal, France, and Spain each use a separate country-specific method. Retirement Lists does not transfer assumptions or values from one country model to another.

Portugal uses a modeled municipality housing profile based on municipality new-lease rent evidence and a Census room-area profile. The bedroom value is modeled; it is not a direct observation of current one- or two-bedroom listings.

France uses modeled planning profiles for 39 catalog communes. The method uses commune advertised-rent indicators, subtracts a standard charge allowance, and applies planning areas of 37 square meters for the T1–T2 profile and 72 square meters for the T3+ profile.

Thirty-eight communes have accepted two-bedroom profiles. One commune’s two-bedroom Couple path remains unavailable. France’s results are modeled commune values, not direct bedroom-specific rents.

Spain uses modeled profiles for nine catalog municipalities. A national actual-rent baseline is adjusted using a municipality habitual-rent price index.

The one- and two-bedroom planning roles are represented through 50-square-meter and 70-square-meter profiles. They are not observed direct one- and two-bedroom rents.

International values may also require currency conversion. The exchange rate supports conversion; it does not supply or validate the underlying housing evidence.

Each source retains its own evidence period, observation or update date, geographic grain, and limitation in the evidence ledger below.