In some U.S. cities, a night out costs over twice as much as a night in, and in some locations, up to three times as much! A study from Rove Lab gathered data and compared doing the same date-night activity at home versus out across the 50 most populous U.S. cities.

Rove Lab compared the cost of two fixed dates. A night out included dinner for two at a restaurant, four beers at a pub, two five-mile taxi rides, and two movie tickets. A night in included ingredients for a home-cooked steak dinner, four store-bought beers, and a $5.99 stream rental. They used local prices from LivingCost.org and calculated a “premium for going out” in each city, which represents how much more a night out costs than a night in.

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Oakland, California tops the list as the most expensive location for a date night. Dinner, drinks, a movie, and a taxi will cost $226.84 there compared to the $67.96 you’d spend on a night in. That’s a 234% premium for going out. Long Beach and Los Angeles were followed behind with premiums over 220%. Virginia Beach and Atlanta round out the top 5, and Jacksonville, Dallas, El Paso, Boston, and Las Vegas complete the top 10.

Some of the results are a little surprising. You might expect New York City to breach the top ten, and it does have the second-most expensive night out at $220.60, but it ranks only 13th because staying in is expensive there as well, so it has a lower premium. San Francisco and San Jose dropped in ranking for the same reason. At the other end of the list, Fort Worth offers the most affordable night out at a 112% premium.

Another ranking in the study might be even more revealing. Research shows U.S. couples have about 18 dates per year, so Rove Lab calculated what share of each city’s median household income goes to these dates. Detroit residents take the hardest hit. 18 nights out cost about $2,684, or 6.84% of a median income, compared with 2.77% for 18 nights in. Miami, Philadelphia, and New York City also rank highly on this metric.

San Jose is at the opposite end of the spectrum. It has one of the most expensive nights out, but high median incomes mean 18 dates take up only 2.61% of a typical household’s earnings. Local prices and incomes vary dramatically, so a city that looks expensive by one metric can look affordable based on another.

The team’s article included two full tables of data. The first lists all 50 cities with item-by-item prices, totals, the dollar difference, and the premium percentage. The second table shows each city’s median income compared to nights out vs. nights in. A summary of findings includes tips for making the most of an affordable night at home. This data might make couples think twice about how they spend their date nights and whether or not they want to adjust their budgets.

Moving into a first apartment is a rite of passage, but the math behind making it a reality is becoming a bigger obstacle. The metros with the strongest job markets also have the steepest living costs, and over the past few years, rent in these areas has climbed faster than paychecks. Cheap rent isn’t the only solution, though. Thin wages and flat hiring shut young people out of many cities.

Rove Lab’s new analysis identifies the cities in the middle ground with the most to offer young people establishing their lives. The study examined the 100 most populous U.S. metro areas and scored each one on 10 different metrics grouped into three weighted categories.

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Financial affordability was the most important category, carrying 60% of the weight. This category covers average annual wage, wage growth, median rent and utility costs, rent-to-income ratio, and cost of living relative to the national average. Cost of living alone received 20% of the weight, the heaviest single metric in the study. Opportunity and access accounted for 24% and included employment growth, number of residents between 22 and 34, and amount of rental vacancy. The final 16% went to entertainment and dining, tracking the number of arts and recreation venues and restaurants and bars per 100,000 residents. Each metric was standardized, scored, and weighted into a final number out of 100.

The winning city was Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers, Arkansas, with a score of 74.24. This isn’t an obvious winner until you look at the numbers. Wages increased by 20.5% from 2022 to 2025, with the average wage at $77,165 and a cost of living that’s 8.65% below the national average. This combination creates a rent-to-income ratio of 19%, leaving young people with money to save, potentially for the elusive dream of homeownership. Fortune 500 companies, Walmart, J.B. Hunt, and Tyson, have a home in the area and likely explain wage strength.

Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos followed with a 73.93 score, driven by a thriving tech sector that’s seen 8.7% employment growth, and the area offers 30,000 vacant rental units for newcomers. Des Moines, Baton Rouge, and Nashville round out the top five.

A few cities earned high rankings thanks to low housing costs. Pittsburgh was seventh overall with a rent-to-income ratio of 17.6%. Wichita, ranked ninth, has low rent and utilities and a low cost of living that’s 11.05% below average. Toledo, number 25 on the list, has the cheapest housing of all cities on the list, with an average of $949 a month.

The most surprising cities on the list are Californian. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara ranks 21st, and San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont lands 24th, despite costs of living well above the national average. Salaries do the heavy lifting, averaging $208,877 and $146,433, respectively. This pulls down San Jose’s rent-to-income ratio to 16.2%, the lowest on the list.

If you were to ask the average American on the street to name the industries that power the national economy, they’ll likely reply “manufacturing” or “tech.” But the Bureau of Economic Analysis says otherwise. As Ooma’s study shows, real estate, rental, and leasing hold the biggest slice of the U.S. economy.

In 2024, the U.S. produced more than $29 trillion in economic output, which outstripped Germany, China, and Japan combined. Looking at how gross domestic product (GDP) breaks down by industry shows the value added by sector after subtracting the costs of the inputs that industry consumed. For example, a carmaker buys steel, rubber, and semiconductors. The value added is the difference between those purchases and the selling price of the finished car. Add up that gap, the value added across every industry in the country, and you arrive at the GDP.

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When Ooma ranked industries by their GDP, they found out that the money is concentrated in these industries:

Real estate, rental, and leasing – 13.8%: Real estate alone accounted for $3.68 trillion, the biggest of any sub-industry in the economy. Every mortgage payment, property tax bill, apartment lease, and commercial rent check pours into this sector. Rising home ownership costs over the past decade have pushed more citizens into renting, which has only inflated this industry.

Manufacturing – 9.8%: Factory employment has fallen for forty years due to automation and offshoring, but output hasn’t fallen. Chemical products created $554 billion, and computer and electronic products contributed $299.8 billion to the U.S. economy, helping keep the nation among the world’s top manufacturing nations despite a smaller workforce.

Professional, scientific, and technical services – 8.0%: This industry is made up of law firms, consultancies, engineering firms, and software developers. Legal services alone created $387.7 billion, and computer systems design added $552.2 billion to the American economy. This strongly shows how the American economy leans toward knowledge work.

Finance and insurance – 7.6%: Credit intermediation and Federal Reserve banks generated $1.01 trillion, insurance carriers contributed $791.8 billion, and securities and commodity contracts brought in $396.1 billion.

State and local government – 7.6%: Many rankings leave out these sectors, but government at the state and local level added $2.07 trillion, second only to real estate among all the sub-industries.

Health care and social assistance – 7.5%: Ambulatory care brought in $1.08 trillion and hospitals contributed $691.5 billion. This reflects genuine demand from an aging population and the fact that the U.S. spends more per capita on healthcare than any other developed nation.

Below these top-tier industries, retail trade, wholesale trade, information (Google, Meta, cloud providers, telecom), data processing, and internet publishing followed. Construction closed out the top ten industries at 4.5%, rising and falling in contributions with the real estate sector.

The largest components of American GDP aren’t the ones that produce a physical product. They’re the industries that manage property, deliver care, sell expertise, and move money.