Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD vs Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD

Reading the Baltimore vs Philadelphia Comparison

Baltimore (MD) and Philadelphia (PA) are assembled here from the same federal data pipeline — BEA Regional Price Parities, HUD Fair Market Rents, BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, FBI Uniform Crime Reports, NCES public-school counts, and EPA environmental indicators — so every number on this page is directly comparable. The overall cost index reads 104.5 for Baltimore against 102.6 for Philadelphia, a 1.9-point gap on a scale where 100 equals the U.S. average. HUD's 2-bedroom Fair Market Rent — the figure used to set housing-choice voucher payment standards — is $1,857/mo in Baltimore and $1,810/mo in Philadelphia, a $47/mo difference that compounds to $564 over a year.

Wage data is reported by metro delineation, and one of these metros is missing a BLS record for the latest OES cycle; the salary columns below fall back to available years. State-level violent crime, the most reliable geographic tier FBI UCR publishes, is 425.1 per 100,000 residents in MD vs 249.5 in PA, with property-crime rates of 2074.5 and 1457.1 respectively.

Schools are reported at the state tier by NCES: MD lists 1,383 public schools at a 14.4:1 student-teacher ratio, while PA lists 2,930 schools at 13.5:1 — a signal of class-size staffing, though individual district and school-level variation within each state is substantial. When these pieces are read together rather than in isolation, Baltimore and Philadelphia are not simply "cheaper" or "more expensive" — they trade across dimensions, and which metro wins depends on whether your household optimizes for rent, wages, schools, childcare, safety, or environment. Treat the tables below as inputs to that trade-off, not as a single ranking.