For American concerned about stretching their savings and income as far as possible after they leave the workplace, finding a place with low livings cost to retire is critical.
Researchers at U.S. News dug into the data in their recently released 2026 Best Places to Retire rankings to find cities with the lowest cost of living in the country, based on the median gross rent and annual housing costs for mortgage-paying homeowners.
The cheapest ones they identified placed relatively high among the 859 cities in the best places to retire rankings. Those rankings are based on overall retirement scores calculated for each area, a weighted average of six indexes. The overall retirement score and each index score were calculated on a 10-point scale.
Researchers assigned weights for each index based on a nationwide online survey that U.S. News conducted in March among 3,500 people 45 and older who were asked to indicate what attributes of a retirement destination were most important to them, chosen from a predefined list of options.
See the accompanying gallery for the cheapest places to retire in 2026, according to U.S. News.
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