Seventeen places around New York, ranked against your commute, your income, and what you actually care about. Change the inputs and the whole piece re-argues itself.
Ranked by your weights above, and shown with the full arithmetic — every figure on this page is derived from these lines. The ranking is a sorting aid, not a verdict.
Every guide to the New York suburbs is written for someone who works in Midtown. That assumption is invisible, and it is load-bearing. Metro-North delivers you to Grand Central; New Jersey Transit delivers you to Penn Station; both are measured to the terminal and the article stops there.
This one measures to , adding the connecting subway leg and the walk at both ends. That extra quarter of an hour is not a rounding error — it is the difference between two places finishing in the same band when every published list puts them in different universes.
Shaded by door-to-door time rather than time to a terminal. Hover any dot to see how the number is built.
Price alone is misleading, because the tax bill moves in the opposite direction to the sticker. The honest comparison is what remains after every tax and the house: gross income, minus federal, state, FICA and city income tax, minus mortgage and property tax. That is the number plotted below.
New York City taxes houses gently and earners heavily. Its Class 1 property tax is one of the lowest effective rates in the region — which is why the expensive Brooklyn houses carry surprisingly ordinary tax bills. Then the city takes it back on the income side: a year at your income, a flat toll unrelated to the house, owed only by residents. Live one subway stop across the river and it disappears.
On , that is taken home inside the city against outside it, before anyone has paid for a house.
Published guides quote the train and stop there. For a downtown desk the connecting leg is often a quarter of the whole trip, and it is the reason the Metro-North towns lose their advantage — their thirty-minute ride lands you fifteen minutes from where you need to be.
Everyone describes a neighbourhood as "charming" or "sleepy" and nobody says what they mean. So this counts: every restaurant, cafe, bar and pub inside a 1.2 kilometre walk, from OpenStreetMap, along with parks, playgrounds, dog runs and food shops.
The spread is larger than any other number on this page. has places to eat and drink within that walk. has . That is not a difference of degree.
Three airports, and which one is yours depends entirely on which side of the river you land on. The New Jersey towns are close to Newark and have a train to it; Brooklyn is close to JFK; LaGuardia is convenient to almost nobody here and has no rail link at all.
| Place | JFK | LGA | EWR | Nearest, and whether you can take a train |
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| Place | Region | Commute | Price | Property tax | Housing / yr | Left over | Schools | Park |
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Tax figures are computed, not assumed. Federal brackets, state schedules, FICA and the New York City resident brackets come from the same 2026 tax data and the same calculator that runs the paycheck estimator on worklets.ai, so they move correctly with income and filing status rather than using a flat effective rate.
Income tax follows the workplace. Working in New York and living in New Jersey means New York State tax on that income, with a New Jersey credit — so crossing the river does not avoid state tax. What it avoids is New York City tax, which reaches residents only. That single line is the entire fiscal difference between Brooklyn and everywhere else here.
Prices are 2026 medians and vary widely by configuration; a Park Slope brownstone spans three to seven million depending on condition, so a single median flatters some places and punishes others. Property tax applies local effective rates to the median price. Housing is mortgage principal and interest plus property tax, and deliberately excludes insurance, maintenance, rail passes, parking, and private school — the last of which would move several rows by tens of thousands.
Amenity counts come from OpenStreetMap, within 1.2 km of a single centre point per place, in September 2026. Two caveats that matter. A 1.2 km radius in Brooklyn covers a dense retail grid; the same radius in Irvington covers mostly houses, so part of the gap is geometry rather than character. And OpenStreetMap is mapped more thoroughly in cities than in suburbs, so the sparse end is probably undercounted. The zero dog runs across every suburb are likely real in the sense that fenced runs are a city solution to not having a yard.
School scores are editorial. A one-to-five read summarised from district-level ratings, not a measurement. Zoning matters more than district inside New York City, and schools within District 15 differ more than the districts differ from each other. Treat the number as a placeholder for a weekend of actual research.
Related tools on worklets.ai: New York paycheck estimator, every US local income tax rate, sourced, house affordability, and cost of living by state. The tax figures here come from the same engine as the paycheck estimator.