Arkansas Ranked Seventh, Not First

Arkansas ranked seventh, not first. I opened this video saying "it is officially official, Realtor.com has announced that Northwest Arkansas is by far the most affordable place to live in America." On Realtor.com's 2026 Affordability and Homebuilding Report Card, Arkansas came in 7th with a grade of B. Indiana was first. No state got an A+.

Here's the thing, though: there is a real national number one for Northwest Arkansas. It's just from a different organization, measuring something else, and it's arguably a better headline than the one I used.

The ranking I should have cited

In January 2026, the Milken Institute named Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers the number one best-performing large metro in America in its annual Best-Performing Cities report. That's about this region specifically, not the state. Job growth and housing affordability were cited among the top drivers.

Milken measures economic performance — jobs, wages, high-tech concentration — with affordability as one input among several. So it isn't "most affordable place to live." It's something arguably more impressive: best-performing, full stop, against every large metro in the country.

I had a genuine national first-place finish available and reached for a different study that didn't say what I wanted it to.

On the Realtor.com study itself: it's a state-level, 100-point scale, split evenly between current housing affordability and homebuilding and permitting activity. It's a housing measure, not a cost-of-living or jobs measure. In the 2025 edition Arkansas scored 65.2 with a B. No Realtor.com study I could find ranks Northwest Arkansas or this metro on affordability at all.

Credit where it's due to past me: I caught part of this on camera. I said "Realtor.com announced that Arkansas is the most affordable place to live in America... and then obviously the best place to live in Arkansas, in honestly all of America, is Northwest Arkansas — so by default, there you go," and I flagged the move myself as telling a bit of a fib. Right instinct. The problem is the premise underneath it.

Northwest Arkansas is the expensive end of Arkansas

This is the part that actually breaks the inference, and it's worth understanding if you're moving here.

Cost of living indices, where the national average is 100:

• Arkansas statewide: about 89 — 11% below national
• Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers metro: 89.9 — 10.1% below national
• Nonmetropolitan Arkansas: about 84 — 16% below national

Northwest Arkansas is not cheaper than the Arkansas average. It's at or slightly above it, and roughly six points more expensive than rural Arkansas.

So "Arkansas is cheap, therefore Northwest Arkansas is cheap" runs backwards. Whatever cost advantage the state has is driven disproportionately by its rural counties. This region is the expensive part of a cheap state.

That's still a good story — 10% below the national average is real money, and it comes with the jobs. It's just not the story I told.

By category statewide: housing runs about 18% below national, clothing 11% lower, utilities 5% lower, groceries about 5% lower. Healthcare is about 2% higher — the one category above the national average.

The housing math, honestly

Against my own affordability claim, here's what the price-to-income ratio looks like.

The August 2026 Arvest Skyline Report puts Benton County's average sale price at $465,888 and Washington County's at $423,750, against an area median income around $101,800. That's roughly 4.2 to 4.6 times income.

The conventional affordability threshold is 3.0. The recent US norm has run somewhere around 4.0 to 4.7. So this metro now sits at or slightly above the national ratio — which is the opposite of what "most affordable place in America" requires.

One methodological caveat I'll flag rather than paper over: Skyline reports average sale price, while national ratios usually use median. Average runs higher in a market with a strong luxury tail, which Benton County has. So the true median-based figure is probably somewhat lower. Call it roughly four and a half times income rather than trusting a decimal.

The regional real estate press itself frames affordability as one of this market's biggest challenges, with prices near $470,000 in Benton County while household income hasn't kept pace. That's not critics talking — that's the industry here.

The one piece of good news for buyers: Skyline describes Northwest Arkansas as a buyer's market, with Benton County's average price down 1.2% year over year.

The state surplus wasn't $800 million to $1 billion "every single year"

I said the last two governors "have ended up with usually between $800 [million] to $1 billion of surplus money — like we're talking excess money every single year."

Here are the actual general revenue surpluses by fiscal year: $945.7 million in FY2021, $1.628 billion in FY2022, $1.161 billion in FY2023, $698.4 million in FY2024, $367.9 million in FY2025, and $655 million in FY2026.

Only FY2021 lands in the band I described. Three years ran well above it, and FY2025 came in at less than half, with total revenue down 4%. FY2026 rebounded to $655 million.

So the shape isn't a steady annual $800 million to $1 billion. It's a post-pandemic spike, a sharp decline through 2025, and a partial recovery.

And there's a cause I didn't mention. Contemporaneous Arkansas reporting attributes the big surpluses in part to federal pandemic stimulus flowing through the state economy and inflating sales and income tax collections. Legislators and analysts at the time warned that surplus money is one-time money and cautioned specifically against using it to fund permanent tax cuts. State officials credited conservative revenue forecasting and belt-tightening instead.

Both explanations are in the record and I think readers should have both. Arkansas also received roughly $1.57 billion in American Rescue Plan state fiscal recovery funds, administered separately — those aren't general revenue and aren't counted in the surplus figures, but they relieved pressure on it.

The tax cuts are real, though, and I had that connection right. The top individual rate went from 7.0% to 6.9% in 2013 under Governor Beebe; from 6.9% down to 4.9% across sessions from 2015 to 2022 under Governor Hutchinson; then 4.9% to 4.7% and to 4.4% in 2023 under Governor Sanders, to 3.9% in June 2024, and to 3.7% in May 2026.

The 66 jobs

I said "one of the fascinating things I found from the previous administration in Arkansas is that he let go of 66 jobs, governmental jobs, in Little Rock, and he didn't rehire for them," and I called the approach "just good leadership, in my opinion." That's an opinion and I'll leave it standing as one. The number underneath it is the problem.

I can't find any such action. There's no record of 66 eliminated jobs in Little Rock.

What actually happened is bigger and, I'd argue, more interesting. Act 910 of 2019 cut Arkansas's cabinet-level agencies from 42 to 15, effective July 1, 2019, and realigned more than 200 boards and commissions under the new departments. It was the largest reorganization of Arkansas state government in nearly fifty years. Projected savings ran about $15 million a year from rent, leases, shared services and eliminating positions that were already vacant.

Critically — and this cuts against my "let go of" framing — nobody was laid off. Governing's headline on it was literally "From 42 Agencies to 15: How Arkansas Overhauled State Government Without Laying Anyone Off."

The workforce did shrink, through attrition and a flexible hiring freeze rather than terminations. Three separate snapshots, not cumulative figures: 754 fewer state workers as of December 2018; a single-year drop of 1,674 reported in November 2021, described as the largest on record; and roughly 1,500 net across the whole tenure.

My best guess at where "66" came from: Arkansas has roughly 66,000 authorized executive branch and higher education positions, about 18% of them vacant as of December 2024. I think I collapsed 66,000 into 66.

On the current administration, which I said does the same thing: there's Arkansas Forward, launched in 2024, targeting at least $300 million in savings and cost avoidance by the end of 2030, with 300-plus opportunities identified across IT, procurement, fleet, personnel and real estate, and roughly $118 million identified so far. The state frames those as operational savings — automation, consolidation, procurement — rather than staffing cuts. There's also an executive order instituting a hiring and promotion freeze, which is the closest direct parallel to the Hutchinson approach.

The accurate sentence would have been: Hutchinson cut cabinet agencies from 42 to 15 in 2019 and shrank the state workforce by roughly 1,500 through attrition and a hiring freeze, without laying anyone off.

The Chicago comparison doesn't hold

I said "on the highways, if they're doing work, they'll usually work during the day and sometimes if it's a really big project they'll work at night. You'll never see that in Chicago and area."

ARDOT absolutely does night work — that half is right. Documented examples on Interstate 49 in Benton and Washington counties include Bella Vista Bypass interchange work with overnight lane closures generally 8 p.m. to 7 a.m., overnight saw-cutting for a new acceleration lane, and rolling overnight closures near Highway 62 from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. in April 2026 for girder installation.

But the Illinois Department of Transportation does night work too, routinely. The Kennedy Expressway reconstruction has run overnight ramp and lane closures typically 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. across multiple phases, plus overnight closures for a $25.2 million Foster Avenue bridge replacement. IDOT publishes the schedules.

"Never in Chicago" is contradicted by Chicago's own construction notices. I'd cut that comparison.

On permitting more broadly: I said the private sector moves fast here "because there's less permitting, there's less red tape, there's less issues." I couldn't find rigorous comparative data on state permitting timelines to support that.

Two numbers that complicate it. Arkansas's new-permit share is 0.9%, exactly matching its share of national population — that's keeping pace, not unusual permissiveness. And in the 2025 Realtor.com report card, Arkansas's new-construction premium was 41.5%, against a national premium of 7.8%. Meaning new construction here carried a substantially larger markup over existing homes than the national norm. Product mix explains some of that, but it doesn't support "light regulation makes building cheap here."

One real deregulatory data point does exist, and it's recent: Act 313 permits accessory dwelling units on residential lots by right, caps application fees at $250, and bars cities from imposing parking mandates or owner-occupancy requirements on them.

And I should credit my own disclosure. I said up front, at length, "I come from a very biased area, meaning biased in a sense like I saw what happens when you come from a very bureaucratic, high tax, annoying area — AKA Chicagoland area, Illinois — versus coming to Arkansas." Telling people where you're standing before you make a comparison is the right thing to do. I just should have checked the comparison.

"Not divided in any shape or form"

I said the region shares one civic mission and that "it's not like we're divided in any shape or form here."

Land use here is actively contested, and the record is easy to find:

• Bentonville's City Council rejected the school district's teacher housing plan in February 2024, on 4-3 votes with an abstention — a one-vote margin against a proposal from the district itself.
• Bentonville's Planning Commission unanimously denied a rezoning in June 2025 after residents spoke against it, and again denied a 10-lot rezoning in August 2026.
• A Fayetteville rezoning near Deane Solomon was approved in May 2026 over more than 15 members of the public speaking in opposition, on compatibility, road safety, wildlife, infrastructure and stormwater.
• School board races are contested.

Here's the version of my point that survives. This region's economic development institutions — the Council, the chambers, the major employers — do show unusual alignment on growth strategy, and four cities cooperating across a metro this way is genuinely uncommon. That's real and worth saying.

But residents disagree with developers, commissions deny projects, and councils split 4-3. That's not a flaw in the region. It's what a functioning city looks like, and I'd rather describe it than paper over it.

What holds up

The comparative caveat I volunteered was the smartest thing in the video: "in all fairness, there's other states in America that have very affordable pricing, but they honestly really don't have Northwest Arkansas... other states that are more affordable really just don't have those kind of cities that are up and coming and really cool to live in."

That's exactly right, and it's the actual argument. Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi all rank ahead of Arkansas on composite cost of living. What they don't have is a metro that the Milken Institute just called the best-performing large metro in the country.

Cost of living isn't the pitch. Cost of living plus the jobs is.

One small thing: I called this "this little gem in the top right or left-hand corner of Arkansas." Northwest. Top left.