The New York City True Cost of Living

The NYC True Cost of Living measures how much income is needed to meet families’ basic necessities, without any public or private assistance. We use the NYC True Cost of Living, formerly known as the New York City Self-Sufficiency Standard, to better understand the realities so many of our neighbors are facing.

History. In 2000, Merble Reagon, Executive Director at the Women’s Center for Education and Career Advancement (WCECA), initiated the development of the first New York City Self-Sufficiency Standard report, after realizing that the thousands of women they had trained and placed in jobs were not earning enough to sustain their families’ basic needs. To keep the issues and facts at the forefront of the public policy discussion, under Merble’s initiative, the Women’s Center arranged for the updates of the Self-Sufficiency Standard for New York City in 2004, 2010, 2014, 2018, and 2021. In 2022, the project moved to a new home—the Fund for the City of New York—and was renamed the NYC True Cost of Living. The 2023 report, Overlooked and Undercounted: Struggling to Make Ends Meet in New York City 2023, is made possible through the sponsorship support of the United Way of New York City.

Renaming. At face value, the name “Self-Sufficiency Standard” is simply descriptive—a measure of what it takes to be able to sustain oneself. The notion of “self-sufficiency” however, can carry negative connotations about those who struggle with poverty, making no reference to the profound impact of low wages and structural inequities. To avoid unintended implications, and in the hopes of making the Standard easier to understand at a glance, the Fund for the City of New York and the United Way of New York City changed the name of the “New York City Self-Sufficiency Standard” to the “NYC True Cost of Living Measure”.