(The Center Square) — A one-hundred dollar bill goes further in Tennessee’s metropolitan areas than in others across the United States, according to a report from the Tax Foundation.
The report measures the purchasing power of $100 based on data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The metropolitan area that stretches from Kingsport to Bristol, Va., is the state’s least expensive metro area, where consumers can get $116.01 of goods and services for $100.
The most expensive area is the Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin area, where that $100 is equal to about $103.5. The purchasing power of
The southeast in general tends to be more expensive than the Pacific Northwest and California, according to the report. Pine Bluff, Ark., is at the bottom of the list, where a one-hundred-dollar bill yields $123.06, followed by Gadsden, Alabama, where it produces $122.
In the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, California area, $100 is equal to $84.82 and takes the top spot for the most pricey metro for the second year in a row. Just down the road in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metropolitan area, $100 gets consumers about $86.73.
Housing costs are one of the main factors affecting purchasing power, according to the Tax Foundation.
“Generally, states with higher nominal incomes also have higher price levels as they tend to see the prices of fixed resources like land rise,” the report said. “When residents seek to occupy a limited amount of available land, it pushes up the cost of housing (especially in areas where housing supply is slow to respond).”
