Some US tech workers spend more than half their salary on rent if they live close to work
Realtor's poll finds San Francisco tech workers are spending up to 56 per cent of their wages on rent
Tech workers may make a killing in the Bay Area, but a lot of that money is going straight back into paying for San Francisco's high rent prices.
Real estate site RadPad teamed up with Anthology to see just how far an engineer's salary will go in San Francisco. After calculating the median salary for a mid-to-senior level engineer, RadPad calculated what percentage of a tech worker's take-home pay (after taxes) is spent on a one-bedroom within a half-mile of their workplace.
Google's San Francisco campus may have the most expensive one bedrooms around it, but the higher salaries it pays its engineers means they're only paying out 44 per cent of their take-home money for a rental. Companies that pay lower salaries, like Zynga, can find their employees doling out more than half their income to pay to live near the office.
Maybe that's the reason why Google employees have taken to living in trucks in the parking lot or finding other outlandish housing solutions.
It's also notable how much cheaper it is to live and work in Los Angeles — at least when it comes to rent.
Here's how much RadPad calculated engineers need to shell out to live near their work: