The Lake Tahoe area of Nevada is home to the majority of the state’s richest cities.
A series of recent studies analyzed and identified the richest cities in a number of states that lie in the geographic Mountain division, such as Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming. For this article, the analysis will be for Nevada’s richest cities. This study analyzed 134 cities in Nevada with complete data from the Census Bureau, in terms of their median household income, mean (average) household income, median home value, and median property taxes paid per year, to come up with a list of the 15 richest places in the state.
Read on to find out what the richest city in Nevada is, plus the top 15 wealthiest cities in the state overall.
What Are the Richest Places in Nevada?
In order to compile this list of the richest cities in Nevada, we sourced key financial data from the Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey. Harnessing these datasets, we put together a scoring system based on four factors to help identify the wealthiest cities in Nevada:
- Median household income
- Mean (average) household income
- Median home value
- Median property taxes paid
The Census Bureau does some interesting things with its data. For certain factors, the Census numbers have upper limits, so there’s no exact value for certain factors. When it comes to median household income, the Census Bureau has an upper limit of “$250,000+”. For median home value, the upper limit is “$2,000,000+”. For median property taxes paid, the upper limit is “$10,000+”. Thus, for these reasons, the mean household income (which is the same as average household income) dataset is crucial because the Census Bureau has exact figures for it. All four of these metrics were scored, added up, and then ranked by the cities’ combined scores.
Census data also categorizes geographies in a particular way that the average person might not conceive of. And it is particularly relevant to Nevada. The Census has a geographic unit called census-designated places, CDPs, which it essentially treats as what people would think of as cities. So, if you see places here listed as cities, it’s because they are CDPs and the Census Bureau more or less treats them as cities or towns.
You’ll find a table detailing the top 15 richest cities in Nevada and their respective dollar figures for each metric, below:
The No. 1 richest city in Nevada in this ranking is Crystal Bay, a very small town of only 80 households, on the northern shore of Lake Tahoe. It borders the state line with California. It sits on Crystal Bay across from Incline Village, another city on this list of wealthiest places in Nevada. The median household income in Crystal Bay is over $250,000. The average household income is an incredible $673,626. Not surprisingly, its median home value is in excess of $2 million, which is the upper limit the Census Bureau tracks. And the median property taxes paid by households is over $10,000 a year.
The second wealthiest place in Nevada is another Lake Tahoe town, Glenbrook. This town is on the east coast of Lake Tahoe, south-southeast of Crystal Bay. The median household income is $223,942, while the average household income is north of $400,000. Like Crystal Bay, the median home value here is over $2 million. The median property taxes paid per household is over $10,000. Nearly 57% of households earn $200,000 or more a year.
The No. 3 richest city in Nevada is Round Hill Village, another town along Lake Tahoe. This place is bigger than the No. 1 and No. 2 cities, being home to 380 households. This town is down in the southeast corner of Lake Tahoe, right near the California border and the aptly named city of Stateline. The median household income is $189,038, while the average household income is $279,816. The median home value here is almost $1.216 million and individual listings can be well over this figure. The median property taxes paid, however, aren’t as bad as in the No. 1 and No. 2 cities, at $3,868 per year.
The Bottom Line on the Richest Cities in Nevada
The vast majority of the top 15 richest cities in Nevada are located in the vicinity of Lake Tahoe, with one or two in the Las Vegas metro area. You can see in the income figures, however, the imbalance in wealth generated by resort towns in the Take Tahoe area. The home values, even more so, convey the wealth disparity, with many places having median home values well beyond what the typical household income can sustain.
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