The median sale price for a home in New York City is $1.2 million. A key factor when deciding whether to buy or rent with incredibly high prices like these, is to know exactly how long you plan on staying in that home.

SmartAsset calculated how long it would take to make buying a home worth your money, which for New York City was 18.3 years.  This was calculated for a household earning $100,000 a year, and used data for the average mortgage from the 2012 American Community Survey.

There are a myriad of different factors that can lead to that number changing, but for the average household it will be quite a long time before you can safely say you’re getting your money’s worth on a house in NYC.

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