Great Falls vs Helena
Both are in Montana, so federal, FICA and state income tax are identical in each: $13,170, $7,650 and $4,289 whichever you choose. The entire difference is property tax and what things cost — $1,567 a year to Helena, $15,673 over 10 years.
Almost nobody is choosing between exactly two cities. Swap either side for any of the 5 metropolitan areas in Montana — the income tax stays identical whichever you pick, so what moves is only the price level and the property tax.
Every city in Montana, against Great Falls
in what the money buys · $15,673 over 10 years · income tax identical in both
A pay cut of up to $2,318 (2.3%) still leaves you level.
Great Falls and Helena are both in Montana. Helena leaves you $1,567 a year better off than Great Falls in what a salary buys.
Helena leaves you $1,567 a year better off than Great Falls
Both of these are in Montana, and that is what makes this comparison clean. Federal income tax, FICA and Montana state income tax are identical on both sides — $13,170, $7,650 and $4,289 whichever you choose. Nothing about the income tax code separates them, so everything that follows comes from two things only: what a house costs you in property tax, and what everything costs you at the till.
On $100,000 with a $400,000 home, the take-home difference is $639 — and that entire figure is property tax, because nothing else in the tax code differs. Great Falls sits at 96.845 on the Bureau of Economic Analysis price index and Helena at 95.675, national average 100.
What the money actually buys: $73,535 in Great Falls against $75,102 in Helena — a difference of $1,567 a year, and $15,673 over the 10 years most people stay somewhere.
Grey columns are what a year of Great Falls and a year of Helena are worth in the same money. The bars between them are each thing that changes, in the order it changes: green adds, amber takes away.
This is the level at which the decision is actually made. Nobody moves "to Montana" — they move to Great Falls or to Helena, and the 5 metropolitan areas in this state spread 9.0 points on the price index.
The tax bill barely moves. The price of living does
Five layers, and on this pair three of them are identical:
Federal income tax — $13,170 either way. Federal, so it cannot differ.
FICA — $7,650 either way. Also federal.
Montana state income tax — $4,289 either way. Same state, same brackets, same deduction. This is the layer that carries most state-to-state comparisons, and here it carries nothing.
Local income tax — zero on both sides. Montana does not let counties or cities levy their own. That is why this pair has a page at all: in the eleven states that do, the local rate is set by jurisdictions that do not line up with metropolitan areas, and we do not publish a figure we would have to invent.
Property tax — $3,676 in Great Falls, $3,037 in Helena on a $400,000 home. 0.92% against 0.76%, each the average of that area's counties weighted by how many homes are in them. This difference is the whole of the take-home gap, because nothing else in the tax code differs.
And then the price level does the rest: $928 a year, more than the property tax difference.
Great Falls housing costs 7.7% more
The index is the Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parity, 2024, published for every metropolitan area in the country and broken into components. Not a crowd-sourced database — an official index with a method document, which is most of why these figures differ from other city comparisons.
Cheaper in Helena than Great FallsDearer in Helena than Great Falls
Each bar is how far apart Great Falls and Helena are on that component, and which way. Housing almost always runs several times wider than everything else — which is why a single blended index tells you very little.
All items — 96.845 in Great Falls, 95.675 in Helena. 1.2 points apart.
Housing — 97.115 against 90.141. 7.0 points, 6.0× the headline gap. Between two cities in the same state, housing is almost always the entire story: the tax code is identical and the supermarket is close to identical, so what is left is what a roof costs.
Goods — 96.006 against 96.006, 0.0 points apart. Groceries and petrol move very little between cities in one state, which is exactly why a single blended cost-of-living number is close to useless here.
Utilities — 73.048 against 72.646. Close, as you would expect under one state grid.
Services — 98.715 against 98.715. Haircuts, restaurants, childcare, repairs.
Neither of these is "Montana"
Every comparison of two states on this site carries the same admission: the price index it uses is a state-wide average, and inside one state a metropolitan area and a rural county differ by more than most pairs of states do. This page is that admission answered.
Montana has 5 metropolitan areas. They run from 93.5 to 102.5 on the price index — 9.0 points, inside one state, with one tax code.
One dot per metropolitan area. Montana runs from 93.5 in Billings to 102.5 in Bozeman — 9.0 points, and 4 of the 5 sit below the national average even though the state as a whole does not.
Great Falls covers 1 county and about 0.1 million people; Helena covers 3 and about 0.1 million. Their property tax rates here are each the average of those counties weighted by how many homes are in them — a house pays the tax, so a county with twice the homes counts twice. A simple average would hand a rural county of a few thousand homes the same weight as an urban one of several hundred thousand.
Renting changes the answer by $622
On this pair the rent-or-buy question matters more than usual, and the reason is structural: property tax is the entire tax difference between these two cities. Take it away and what is left is nothing but the price level.
Renting, the difference is $946 a year in favour of Helena. Buying a $400,000 home it is $1,567 in favour of Helena. So buying widens it: the cheaper city is also the one with the lighter property tax, and the two effects compound.
A renter still pays the property tax, of course — it is inside the rent — but not as a separate bill tied to a value they chose, and the housing price index (97.115 against 90.141) is what captures it for them. The figure above is for someone comparing two mortgages, not two leases.
Change the home value in the calculator above and this whole page moves with it. On a pair like this, where property tax is the only tax that differs, the house you are picturing changes the answer more than your salary does.
The property tax bill, house by house
Property tax is the only tax that separates these two cities, and it scales with the house — so the single number at the top of this page is really a line, not a point. At 0.92% in Great Falls and 0.76% in Helena:
A $200,000 home — $1,838 a year in Great Falls, $1,518 in Helena, a gap of $320. Overall: Helena by $1,257 a year.
A $300,000 home — $2,757 a year in Great Falls, $2,278 in Helena, a gap of $479. Overall: Helena by $1,412 a year.
A $400,000 home — $3,676 a year in Great Falls, $3,037 in Helena, a gap of $639. Overall: Helena by $1,567 a year.
A $600,000 home — $5,514 a year in Great Falls, $4,555 in Helena, a gap of $959. Overall: Helena by $1,878 a year.
A $800,000 home — $7,352 a year in Great Falls, $6,074 in Helena, a gap of $1,278. Overall: Helena by $2,189 a year.
The answer holds across that whole range: Helena at every house value from $200,000 to $800,000. It is $933 wider at the top of it than at the bottom.
Two caveats this arithmetic does not carry. The first is that the rate used is the effective rate — tax actually paid over market value, across the counties of each area, so it already absorbs assessment ratios and the ordinary homestead exemptions rather than pretending they do not exist. The second is that it is an average of counties, and inside a metropolitan area a school district can move a bill by a good deal more than the difference between these two cities. Your address decides that, and this page cannot see your address.
Who this changes for, and by how much
Because both cities are in Montana, filing status and household size cannot change which city comes out ahead through the tax code — the same brackets apply on both sides. What they change is the size of the gap, and they change it in a direction most people get backwards: the more you take home, the more the price difference costs you, because the price level applies to everything you spend.
A single filer on $60,000 — Helena by $1,232 a year. Take-home $44,651 in Great Falls, $45,290 in Helena.
A single filer on $100,000 — Helena by $1,567 a year. Take-home $71,215 in Great Falls, $71,854 in Helena.
A couple filing jointly on $100,000 — Helena by $1,649 a year. Take-home $77,655 in Great Falls, $78,294 in Helena.
A couple filing jointly on $160,000 — Helena by $2,181 a year. Take-home $119,775 in Great Falls, $120,414 in Helena.
A single filer on $250,000 — Helena by $2,774 a year. Take-home $166,742 in Great Falls, $167,381 in Helena.
The couple on $100,000 and the single filer on $100,000 pay different federal tax — the joint standard deduction and wider brackets see to that — but they pay it identically in both cities, so the difference between the two columns is untouched by it. What moves the gap is the larger amount left over to spend at Great Falls prices or Helena prices.
The practical reading: the higher your income, the more a city with a lower price level is worth to you in dollars, and the less a property tax difference matters as a share of it. On a $60,000 salary the property tax on a $400,000 home is a much larger slice of what you have; on $250,000 it is close to noise. The calculator at the top of this page runs your own figures through the same engine.
Nationally, Great Falls is 127th of 380 and Helena is 148th
It helps to know whether you are choosing between two expensive places or two cheap ones, because the same dollar gap means different things at different levels.
Of the 380 US metropolitan areas the Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes a price index for, Great Falls ranks 127th at 96.845 and Helena ranks 148th at 95.675, counting from the most expensive. Both sit in the broad middle, which is where most of the country lives and where these comparisons are hardest to eyeball.
For scale: the national range runs from 83.597 in Monroe to 115.613 in San Francisco. The gap between Great Falls and Helena is 1.2 points, which is 3.7% of that whole national spread — inside one state.
Purchasing power on $100,000: $73,535 in Great Falls, $75,102 in Helena.
Is $1,567 a lot? Against the other 1,521 pairs, here is where it sits
A dollar figure on its own is hard to judge, so this site resolved all 1,522 pairs of metropolitan areas that share a state on the same salary and the same house, and this page can therefore say where its own pair falls rather than leaving you to guess.
The median pair differs by $3,385 a year. Great Falls against Helena differs by $1,567, which puts it at about the 26th percentile — close to the middle of the distribution — a real difference, and not an extreme one.
For the two ends of the scale: the widest within-state pair in the country differs by $22,551 a year and the narrowest by $7. The whole distribution is built with the income tax held constant, which is what makes it comparable — every one of these 1,522 numbers is prices and property tax and nothing else.
It is the same measurement discipline as the rest of the site: the number published is the one that came out of the engine over the whole set, not an impression of it. How the method works, including what it does not claim.
What you would need to earn in Helena: $97,682
The question behind most of these searches is not "which is cheaper". It is "I have an offer in Helena — is it enough?"
$97,682 matches what $100,000 buys you in Great Falls. That is 2.3% less than you earn now, so you could take a cut of $2,318 and be no worse off.
The dashed line is the salary you earn now. The solid line is what matches it in Helena. If the relationship were a simple multiplier the two would be parallel — they are not, because brackets, the Social Security ceiling and a property tax that does not move with income all bend it.
Between two cities in one state this figure is unusually trustworthy, because the tax side of it cancels: no bracket differences, no state deduction differences, nothing to argue about. What is left is arithmetic on prices and property tax.
Over 10 years: $15,673
At $1,567 a year, 10 years in Helena instead of Great Falls is worth $15,673 in today's purchasing power.
A move between two cities in the same state is the cheapest kind — no change of tax residence, no new state filing, often no change of employer. Reckon $15,000 for removal and the costs of buying and selling, which is this page's assumption rather than a sourced figure, and at this rate it takes 9.6 years to earn back.
The line starts below zero because moving costs about $15,000 and lands entirely in year one. It takes until year 10 for the move to pay for itself. That is the figure a per-year comparison hides.
At three horizons: $4,702 over three years, $15,673 over 10, $47,020 over thirty.
And the limit worth stating: this is a measure of what a salary buys, not of which city is a better place to live. Schools, commute, weather and how far you are from your family are not in it, and on a move within one state they are usually what actually decides it.
The other Montana comparisons people run next
Almost nobody is choosing between exactly two cities. These are the other Montana pairs involving Great Falls or Helena, resolved on the same salary and the same house so they can be read against each other:
Billings vs Great Falls — Billings by $3,098 a year. Billings indexes at 93.526 on prices with property tax at 0.80%.
Great Falls vs Missoula — Missoula by $424 a year. Missoula indexes at 96.445 on prices with property tax at 0.89%.
Bozeman vs Great Falls — Great Falls by $2,816 a year. Bozeman indexes at 102.51 on prices with property tax at 0.60%.
Or start from the whole state: every Montana city comparison, with all 5 of its metropolitan areas ranked.
Where every number here comes from
Three sources, each read off the body that publishes it:
US Bureau of Economic Analysis — Regional Price Parities by State and Metro Area, 2024 (released 19 February 2026) — read 2026-09-10. https://www.bea.gov/data/prices-inflation/regional-price-parities-state-and-metro-area
US Census Bureau — Core Based Statistical Areas delineation file, 2023 (which counties form each metropolitan area) — read 2026-09-10. https://www.census.gov/geographies/reference-files/time-series/demo/metro-micro/delineation-files.html
US Census Bureau, American Community Survey — county effective property tax rates and housing units — read 2026-08-31. https://data.census.gov/
IRS revenue procedure for the federal brackets and FICA, and Montana's own department of revenue for the state rates — both identical on the two sides of this page, which is the point.
How the three fit together, because joining them is where this kind of page usually breaks:
— The metropolitan area price index and the counties that form each area are published by two different agencies, and joined here by CBSA code rather than by name — there are thirty "Washington County" in the United States and a join on names would have produced silent errors.
— A metropolitan area's property tax rate is the housing-unit-weighted average of its counties. Property tax is paid by a house, so a county with twice the homes counts twice; a simple average would give a rural county of 4,000 homes the same weight as an urban one of 800,000.
— Where a metropolitan area crosses a state line — 43 of the 380 do — the state income tax is computed on the state holding most of its housing, and the page says which state that is and what share sits outside it.
And what this page does not model:
— The cost of living index is the BEA's Regional Price Parity for 2024, the most recent published. It is not extrapolated to the current year, and it is a state-wide average — inside a state, a metro area and a rural county differ by more than most state pairs do.
— Moving costs, state transfer taxes on buying a home, and the cost of selling the one you have are not included. On a short stay they can outweigh every annual difference on this page.
— Sales tax is not modelled. It is inside the BEA index — that is what a price parity measures — but it is not broken out separately here.
— The comparison assumes the same salary in both places unless you change it. In practice a job in a high-cost state usually pays more, which is exactly what the break-even figure is for.
— Health insurance, childcare and car insurance vary enormously by state and are only inside the index as averages. If any of the three is a large part of your budget, it deserves its own arithmetic.
Where to go next
Questions
- Is it cheaper to live in Great Falls or Helena?
- Helena, by $1,567 a year in what the money buys, on $100,000 with a $400,000 home. Both are in Montana, so federal, FICA and state income tax are identical either way — the entire difference is property tax ($3,676 against $3,037) and the price level (96.845 against 95.675, where 100 is the national average).
- How much do I need to earn in Helena to match $100,000 in Great Falls?
- $97,682 — 2.3% less than you earn now, so a cut of up to $2,318 still leaves you level. Because both cities are in Montana, the tax side of that figure cancels out and what remains is prices and property tax.
- Do Great Falls and Helena pay different income tax?
- No. Both are in Montana: federal income tax is $13,170, FICA $7,650 and state income tax $4,289 on either side of the comparison. Montana also does not let counties or cities levy their own income tax, so that layer is genuinely zero rather than unmodelled. The only tax that differs is property tax.
- Which has higher property tax, Great Falls or Helena?
- Great Falls, at 0.92% against 0.76% — $639 a year on a $400,000 home. Each rate is the average of that area's counties weighted by how many homes are in them, from US Census Bureau data.
- Is the cost of living really that different inside one state?
- Yes, and that is the reason these pages exist. Montana's 5 metropolitan areas run from 93.5 to 102.5 on the Bureau of Economic Analysis price index — 9.0 points under a single tax code. A state-level comparison averages that away.
- Does it matter whether I rent or buy?
- More than usual on this pair, because property tax is the only tax that differs between these two cities. Renting — no property tax bill at all — the gap is $946 a year in favour of Helena. Buying a $400,000 home it is $1,567 in favour of Helena. A renter still pays the tax inside the rent; what changes is that it is no longer tied to a value you chose.
- Does being married change which city is better?
- Not through the tax code — both cities are in Montana, so filing jointly changes your federal bill identically on either side. It changes the size of the gap, not its direction: a couple filing jointly on $100,000 sees $1,649 a year, against $1,567 for a single filer on the same salary, because the price level applies to whatever is left after tax.
- Where does your cost of living data come from?
- The Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities for 2024, published for every US metropolitan area with a documented method, and broken into housing, goods, utilities and services. Not a crowd-sourced database — which is the single choice that most separates these figures from other city comparisons.