Santa Clara County, CA

Key HUD figures for Santa Clara County, CA

Fair Market Rents by bedroom

What "low income" means at a $205,500 area median

A four-person Low Income limit of $162,400

The three bands for a four-person household here are $61,650 Extremely Low, $102,750 Very Low and $162,400 Low. The Very Low figure is exactly 50.0% of area median family income; the Low figure is 79.0% of it. The Low Income band runs from $113,700 for one person to $214,400 for eight.

Those are not unusual fractions — what makes them notable is what they are fractions of. The typical HUD area in this dataset has an area median family income of $94,300, so a four-person household that counts as low income in Santa Clara has more income than the entire area median of a median HUD area. The category is defined relative to the local area, never nationally, which is exactly why the thresholds on this page cannot be compared to the ones on a page in another state.

Fifth of 58 on rent, first of 58 on area income

Very high rent, very high income, an ordinary benchmark

First on area income, fifth on the income limit

It would be reasonable to expect the highest area income to produce the highest income limits. It does not. Four California counties have a higher four-person Low Income limit than Santa Clara: Santa Cruz County at $174,550, and Marin County, San Francisco and San Mateo at $168,100 each. Santa Cruz's area median family income is $137,200 — $68,300 below this county's — and its limit is $12,150 higher.

So Santa Clara ranks 1st of 4,764 on area income and 5th on the four-person Low Income limit. The practical point for a reader is that the limits are not a fixed percentage of the area median family income and cannot be reconstructed from it; HUD publishes the derivation with its income-limits dataset.

The benchmark on this page behaves the same way. At 20.3% it is only 24th lowest of California's 58 records, because a very large rent is being divided by a very large income. High rent alone does not produce a high benchmark — Los Alamos County, New Mexico, the highest area income outside California at $182,500, pairs it with a $1,740 rent for an 11.4% benchmark.

HUD area for this county

National economic context

The figures below are federal and national. They are not specific to Santa Clara County and do not vary between counties.

Inflation (official BLS CPI-U national series)

Purchasing power decision engine

IRS reference

Publication 15-T (2026) — Federal Income Tax Withholding Methods. Official IRS publication →

Reference only. GovCalculator does not compute federal income tax withholding. The publication's withholding methods and tables are not ingested or modelled here.

Sources & methodology

HUD income limits and Fair Market Rents are taken from the fiscal-year tables HUD publishes per HUD-defined area — which can include more than one county — and joined to this county record. State comparisons are computed across the 2BR Fair Market Rents of the county records in the same state; the median uses the middle value and is not weighted by households or population, rank 1 is the highest rent in the state, and county records with identical rents share a rank.

The income figure used throughout this page is HUD's Median Family Income for the HUD area above. It is not a Census median household income and the two are not interchangeable.

The purchasing power module applies a historical CPI ratio: Adjusted = Nominal × CPI(to) / CPI(from). No interpolation is applied and missing months are not imputed; CPI-U is a historical index, not a forecast. The “STABLE” target adds a fixed +10% buffer over the local HUD Median Family Income — that buffer is a GovCalculator heuristic, not a HUD, BLS or IRS determination.

The CPI-U series is the official BLS CUUR0000SA0 index, not seasonally adjusted, taken from the published BLS series: 36 published monthly observations. Months BLS did not publish are not interpolated. IRS Publication 15-T is cited as an official reference only — no federal withholding is calculated anywhere on this site.

Verify eligibility requirements with local program administrators: household size, deductions, and program-specific definitions can materially change outcomes.

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