How taco affordability is calculated.

The formula

Taco affordability is the number of tacos one hour of local work buys at the median wage:

Both inputs are city-specific. Wages come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Taco prices come from per-city research, anchored on named taquerias and the local Taco Bell price.

1. Wages — BLS OEWS, median hourly, MSA

The wage denominator is the median hourly wage for all occupations, at the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) level, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program (OEWS).

2. Taco prices — per-city research, two anchors

The taco price for each city is the average of two anchors:

• Fast-casual taqueria price. A representative single-taco menu price at established local taquerias — named for each city. Sources include menu pages, Yelp, food-truck directories (Roaming Hunger), local news / food blogs (Texas Monthly, LA Taco, Mission Local, Visit Philly, Orlando Weekly, Edible Memphis, and others), and Reddit threads.
• Local Taco Bell crunchy taco. A regional or per-store chain price for the standard crunchy taco — the most uniformly distributed and well-known American taco, used to anchor the high-supply, low-cost end of the market.

The average of these two anchors is the city's average taco price:

Each city's ranking row links to a detail page that names the businesses behind the fast-casual anchor and notes the Taco Bell price tier.

Chain price verification

Chain prices were tiered by region for the initial build, then eight major-metro cities were spot-verified against per-store Uber Eats menu pages, which expose taco prices in the page's static JSON-LD schema. Uber Eats prices were divided by ~1.15 to back out the typical delivery markup and produce an implied in-store price.

Four cities were corrected up after verification (Boston, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle); four were within range and kept (Los Angeles, Sacramento, Portland, Washington DC). The other 25 cities retain their original regional-tier values.

3. Limitations

Median, not mean

This index uses the OEWS median hourly wage, not the mean. The result is a ranking where San Francisco lands at #25 rather than at the bottom — its very high median wage offsets its very high taco prices. Using the mean would push New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to the bottom in the order you might expect from a cost-of-living gut check, but it would systematically overstate purchasing power for the typical worker in every market. We chose to anchor on the median.

"Average taco price" is a simplification

Real taco prices vary by neighborhood, tortilla type (corn vs. flour), protein, and format (street stand vs. brick-and-mortar). The per-city number on this site is a representative midpoint — close to what a typical eater would pay for a single corn-tortilla protein taco at an established taqueria, averaged against the chain anchor. It is not the mean of every taco sold in the city.

Per-city data caveats

Several cities are flagged in our research notes as having thinner data than the rest:

• Miami. Fast-casual taco data is the thinnest of any city; per-taco menu prices for representative taquerias are scarce online. Moderate confidence.
• St. Louis. Published per-taco prices for Cherokee Street taquerias were not surfaced cleanly online. Figure represents Midwest taqueria norms.
• Jacksonville. Sits at the bottom of the affordability ranking partly because the cheap mom-and-pop taqueria layer that Houston / Oklahoma City / San Antonio have does not exist in Jacksonville. Not a data error — a structural feature of the local food market.
• Boston. Single tacos sold à la carte at fast-casual taquerias are less of an established format in Boston than in Texas or the Midwest. Moderate confidence on the fast-casual anchor.
• Oklahoma City. Significant supply at the $1–$2 truck level would justify a lower fast-casual figure; we used $2.75 to align with established taquerias.

What this index is not

TacoIndex.com is not an inflation gauge, a substitute for CPI, or a commercial price feed. The headline metric is a snapshot of one consumer good's affordability against one wage measure, in one period. It is most useful as an intuitive way to compare relative purchasing power across U.S. metros — the same way the Big Mac Index is most useful for cross-country comparisons.

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Update cadence

Wages refresh annually when BLS publishes the next OEWS release. Taco prices are refreshed periodically as menu prices move and as new submissions accumulate from the submission form. Each city's detail page shows the wage release year used.