Living in Silicon Valley is not what the movies show you, and it is not what the doom headlines show you either. I have been selling real estate in this valley since 2003, I have closed more than 450 transactions here, and I have worked through three booms and two crashes without leaving. What follows is the version of this conversation I have with clients over coffee, with the actual numbers attached.
I am going to skip the tourist material. If you want a list of coffee shops, Google will do a better job than I can. What you probably want to know is what a house really costs, what your property tax bill will look like, whether the commute is going to wreck your life, and whether you are going to be happy here after the novelty wears off. That is what this guide covers, and I have updated every figure in it as of September 2026.
What is in this guide
- Where Silicon Valley actually starts and stops
- What it costs, town by town, right now
- Property taxes, Prop 13, and Prop 19
- What the houses are actually like
- The commute, honestly
- Schools and why the district matters more than the city
- Weather, microclimates, and wildfire insurance
- The towns, in plain language
- How buying a home here actually works
- Living here after 60
- Who thrives here and who leaves
- Common questions
Where Silicon Valley actually starts and stops
Silicon Valley has no legal boundary. There is no Silicon Valley city hall and no Silicon Valley county line, which is why you will get a different answer from every person you ask. The geographic core is the Santa Clara Valley floor, running roughly from Palo Alto in the north down through San Jose in the south, hemmed in by the Santa Cruz Mountains on the west and the Diablo Range on the east. Before the chip companies arrived this was the Valley of Heart’s Delight, and it was the largest fruit-producing region in the world.
In practice, when people say Silicon Valley they mean Santa Clara County plus the southern end of San Mateo County, so Menlo Park, Atherton, Woodside, Redwood City and San Carlos get folded in. Some people stretch it across the bay to Fremont and Newark, and these days a fair number of people use it as shorthand for the entire tech industry regardless of geography. Santa Clara County alone holds 1,914,391 people as of July 2025, which makes it the most populous county in Northern California and larger than fourteen states.
The distinction matters more than you would think when you are buying. County lines determine your property tax rate, your transfer tax, your recording process, and often your school district. A house in Palo Alto and a house in Menlo Park are four miles apart and sit in different counties with different rules.
Silicon Valley sits at the south end of San Francisco Bay, covering Santa Clara County and the southern Peninsula.
What it costs, town by town, right now
Here is the part nobody puts near the top of the page, so I will. These are median sale prices for the three months ending August 2026, pulled from Redfin, for the cities people actually ask me about.
| City | Median sale price | Year over year | Median days on market |
|---|---|---|---|
| Los Altos | $4,497,000 | +5.4% | 8 |
| Saratoga | $4,197,000 | +2.4% | 13 |
| Palo Alto | $3,513,000 | +5.8% | 15 |
| Cupertino | $2,858,000 | -11.1% | 16 |
| Los Gatos | $2,723,000 | +6.5% | 23 |
| Campbell | $1,827,000 | -1.0% | 24 |
| Mountain View | $1,799,000 | +2.8% | 19 |
| Sunnyvale | $1,741,000 | -5.9% | 17 |
| Santa Clara | $1,679,000 | -1.2% | 21 |
| San Jose | $1,398,000 | -3.6% | 21 |
Source: Redfin market data, three months ending August 2026.
Two things jump out of that table. The first is the spread. Los Altos and San Jose are twelve miles apart and the median house costs three times as much in one of them. That is not a quality-of-construction difference, it is school districts, lot size, and sixty years of accumulated demand pressure on a small number of parcels.
The second is that the market is not moving in one direction anymore. Cupertino is down 11 percent year over year while Palo Alto is up 5.8 percent and Los Gatos is up 6.5 percent. What I am seeing behind those numbers is a top end driven by cash and by equity rolled in from a previous sale, which does not care much about interest rates, and a middle market between roughly $1.5 million and $2.5 million that is very much rate-sensitive and where buyers are negotiating in a way they were not in 2021.
The county picture
For Santa Clara County as a whole in August 2026, the median single-family resale price was $1,894,440. Homes averaged 25 days on market and sold at 102.9 percent of list price, which means the typical closed sale still went over asking. There were 568 single-family sales in the month, down 12.9 percent from a year earlier, and inventory sat at 48 days of supply.
Read those together and you get the real story of this market. Fewer people are transacting, because sellers with a 3 percent mortgage and a low Prop 13 assessment have every reason to stay put, and that shortage of listings is holding prices up even as demand softens. It is a slow market that still feels competitive when you are the one writing the offer.
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Median household income in Santa Clara County is $164,281, which is roughly double the national figure and still not enough to buy the median house. Here is the arithmetic on a $1.9 million purchase with 20 percent down: you are financing $1.52 million, which at current rates runs about $9,600 a month in principal and interest, plus roughly $2,000 a month in property tax and another $200 to $400 for insurance. Call it $12,000 a month before you have fixed anything or mowed anything.
Underwriting guidelines generally want that number under about 40 percent of gross income, so you are looking at a household earning somewhere north of $350,000 to do it comfortably. That is why the homeownership rate here is only 55.1 percent, well below the national average, and why so many of my buyers are either dual-income tech households or people rolling equity in from a house they already own. Median gross rent, for comparison, is $2,857.
If you want to watch these numbers move month to month rather than trusting a snapshot, I keep live Bay Area home price and sales charts updated on this site.
Property taxes, Prop 13, and Prop 19
This is the section I wish every buyer read before they started looking, because it is where the most money gets won and lost, and almost nobody explains it properly.
Prop 13 sets your tax bill at the day you buy
California assesses your property at what you paid for it, and then Proposition 13 caps how fast that assessed value can rise at 2 percent a year. The base tax rate is 1 percent of assessed value, and once voter-approved school and infrastructure bonds are layered on, most Santa Clara County bills land somewhere between about 1.1 and 1.35 percent.
The practical consequence catches people off guard every single time. Your neighbor in an identical house who bought in 1991 may be paying $3,200 a year while you pay $23,000 for the same square footage, the same street, and the same city services. That is not an error and there is no appeal for it. When you are budgeting, calculate your tax bill from your purchase price and ignore whatever the current owner is paying, because the number on the listing is about to reset.
Prop 19 is the best-kept secret for anyone over 55
If you are 55 or older, severely disabled, or a wildfire or disaster victim, Proposition 19 lets you carry your existing low assessed value with you to a replacement home. You can do it up to three times in your lifetime, the replacement home can be anywhere in California rather than just a handful of participating counties, and you have two years from the sale of the old home to buy the new one. It took effect April 1, 2021, and the filing fee in Santa Clara County is $110.
Here is what that is worth in real dollars. Say you bought your house in Willow Glen in 1988 for $210,000. With the 2 percent cap, your assessed value today is somewhere around $390,000 and your tax bill is roughly $4,900 a year. You sell for $2.2 million and buy a single-level home in Campbell for $1.5 million. Because the replacement costs less than what you sold for, your old base year value comes with you, and your tax bill on the new house stays near $4,900 instead of jumping to about $18,750.
That is close to $14,000 a year, every year, for as long as you own the new home. If you buy up instead, say a $2.6 million replacement, the formula adds the difference to your base, so your new assessed value becomes $390,000 plus the $400,000 you went over, or $790,000. Still a fraction of what a new buyer next door would pay.
I have watched people leave that entire benefit on the table because nobody told them it existed, or because they bought the new house before selling the old one in a way that broke the two-year window. If you are in that age bracket and thinking about moving, talk to somebody about the sequencing before you do anything else.
What the houses are actually like
A huge share of the housing stock across Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Mountain View and central San Jose went up between 1950 and 1975, when the orchards came out and the tract builders moved in. The archetype is a single-story three bedroom, two bath house of 1,100 to 1,600 square feet on a 6,000 to 7,500 square foot lot, built on a concrete slab, originally with single-pane aluminum windows and a wall furnace. Many of them still have their original kitchens and their original galvanized supply lines.
Scattered through that inventory are the Eichlers, which have a devoted following and a maintenance profile all their own. Joseph Eichler built roughly 11,000 homes in Northern California, with big concentrations in Palo Alto, the Fairbrae area of Sunnyvale, Fairglen in San Jose, and Mountain View. Post-and-beam construction, floor-to-ceiling glass, an atrium in the middle, radiant heat in the slab. They are genuinely beautiful and I love showing them, but you need to go in knowing that the radiant heating pipes fail, the flat roofs need attention, there is essentially no wall insulation, and replacing that much single-pane glass costs real money.
Los Altos, Saratoga and Los Altos Hills run to larger lots, and a meaningful share of what sells there gets torn down and rebuilt, which is why the medians look the way they do. Los Gatos mixes Victorian-era homes near downtown with 1960s and 1970s hillside properties. Willow Glen and Naglee Park in San Jose have genuine pre-war character, along with genuine pre-war knob-and-tube wiring.
Things you will almost never find here: basements, wraparound porches, and mature hardwood shade. Things you will find constantly: additions and converted garages done without permits, which is a real negotiating issue at resale; foundation movement in the expansive clay soils of south and east San Jose; and sewer laterals that are a hundred years old in the older neighborhoods.
A typical Silicon Valley neighborhood: single-story 1950s and 1960s ranch homes on modest lots.
The commute, honestly
Mean travel time to work in Santa Clara County is 26.2 minutes, which surprises people who have been told to expect two hours. The average is misleading, though, because the distribution is brutal at the tails. Living in Sunnyvale and working in Sunnyvale is a twelve minute drive. Living in Gilroy and working in Palo Alto is ninety minutes each way on a bad Tuesday, and there are a lot of bad Tuesdays.
Which freeway corridor you sit on matters far more than how many miles you cover. Interstate 280 is the scenic one and usually the faster one, running the west side of the valley up the Peninsula. Highway 101 is the workhorse and the parking lot, and it is where most of the big employers sit. Highway 85 is useful if your trip runs from the west valley up to the north valley, and 237 links the north valley across to Fremont and the East Bay by way of 880 and 680.
On transit, Caltrain runs the Peninsula spine from Gilroy up to San Francisco and is now electrified, which made it meaningfully faster and quieter. VTA light rail covers north San Jose, Mountain View and Campbell, and it is genuinely useful if your origin and destination both happen to sit on it. BART now reaches Milpitas and Berryessa, with the downtown San Jose and Santa Clara extension still under construction.
My actual advice, and I give it to every relocating buyer: pick your commute before you pick your town. Drive the route at 8:15 on a weekday, not at 2pm on a Sunday when the agent is showing you the house. Ten miles in the wrong direction is an hour a day, which works out to about 250 hours a year of your life.
Which freeway corridor you live on matters more than how many miles you drive.
Schools and why the district matters more than the city
School quality drives price here more than almost any other single variable, and 56.5 percent of adults in the county hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, so you can imagine how seriously this gets taken. Palo Alto Unified, Los Gatos-Saratoga Joint Union, Cupertino Union, Fremont Union, Los Altos and Saratoga Union consistently sit at the top of the state rankings.
The critical thing to understand is that district boundaries do not follow city boundaries. Two houses across the street from each other in Sunnyvale can feed different elementary schools and differ by $200,000 in value because of it. Cupertino the city and Cupertino Union the district are not the same footprint, and plenty of homes with a Cupertino mailing address are not in the Cupertino schools. Always verify attendance with the district office directly, and never rely on what the listing says or on a third-party school website.
There is a quieter conversation to have here too. The academic pressure in the highest-ranked districts is intense, and it does not suit every child. I have had families move into Palo Alto for the schools and move out again three years later for their kid’s mental health. Worth thinking about honestly before you pay the premium.
Weather, microclimates, and wildfire insurance
The weather is the thing nobody regrets. We get roughly 300 sunny days a year, summer highs in the 80s with very little humidity, mild winters with rain concentrated between November and March, and frost that shows up a handful of mornings a year. You can garden in February and eat outside in October.
What people miss is how much it varies inside twenty miles. Los Gatos and Saratoga run several degrees warmer in summer than Palo Alto and Mountain View, which catch more of the bay influence. Fog spills over the Santa Cruz Mountains and reaches into Los Altos Hills and the western edge of the valley on summer mornings. Morgan Hill and Gilroy are the hottest, regularly ten degrees above the north valley in August.
The part of this that has changed in the last several years is insurance. Homes in the Santa Cruz Mountains foothills, the western edges of Los Gatos and Saratoga, and the eastern foothills above San Jose are now in a genuinely difficult insurance market. Some carriers have stopped writing there entirely and the FAIR Plan has become a common fallback. If you are looking at anything in or near those zones, get an insurance quote before you write the offer rather than during escrow, because I have seen deals fall apart over exactly this.
The towns, in plain language
Every town here has a reputation, and the reputations are mostly accurate but rarely complete. Here is my short version, with links to the deeper profiles I keep on each one.
The premium west valley. Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Saratoga and Monte Sereno are the top of the market. Big lots, top-ranked schools, quiet residential streets, very little commercial anything. Los Altos has a genuinely charming small downtown. Saratoga is more wooded and more spread out, and the hillside properties there come with the insurance questions I mentioned above.
Los Gatos and Campbell. Los Gatos is the town people fall in love with on the first visit, and it has the walkable downtown that most of the valley lacks, plus quick access over Highway 17 to the beach. Campbell next door is the value play in the west valley, with its own good downtown, the Los Gatos Creek Trail, and prices roughly a third lower.
The employment core. Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino and Santa Clara are where the jobs and the tract homes are. If your work is at Google, Apple, LinkedIn, Nvidia or Meta, this is where the short commute lives. Castro Street in Mountain View and Murphy Avenue in Sunnyvale are the two best restaurant strips in the valley.
San Jose. San Jose is not one place, it is about thirty. Willow Glen, Rose Garden and Naglee Park have pre-war character and walkability. Almaden Valley and Evergreen are family-oriented with newer construction. Berryessa now has BART. North San Jose is mid-rise and growing. The median hides enormous variation, and this is the city where working with someone who knows the neighborhoods matters most.
South county and the east side. Morgan Hill and Gilroy give you the most house and land per dollar in the county, at the cost of a real commute. Milpitas sits at the 880 and 237 junction with BART access and prices below the core.
Plenty of people I work with also end up looking over the hill at Santa Cruz County, which is forty minutes from Los Gatos on a good day and a completely different way of life.
How buying a home here actually works
The local process is different enough from the rest of the country that out-of-state buyers regularly lose their first two or three offers just learning the rules. Here is what is different.
Disclosures come first, not later. Most sellers here assemble a disclosure package before the house hits the market, often running 150 to 300 pages, including a general home inspection, a pest inspection, sometimes a roof and a sewer scope, plus the natural hazard report and the statutory disclosures. You are expected to read all of it before you write. That is the local norm, not a red flag.
Offer dates are common. The listing agent sets a date, usually a week to ten days out, and everybody writes at once. Showing up with an offer before the date sometimes works and sometimes annoys the seller, and knowing which is which is most of the job.
Contingencies are a competitive lever. Because the inspections are already done, many buyers write with no inspection contingency, and in the higher price bands a lot of them write with no loan or appraisal contingency either. Countywide the typical sale closed at 102.9 percent of list in August. I am not going to tell you to waive everything, because there are real risks in it, but you should understand that this is the field you are playing on.
Get fully underwritten, not pre-qualified. A pre-qualification letter is close to worthless in a multiple-offer situation here. Have your lender run the full underwrite so your offer can stand next to the cash ones. Escrows commonly run 21 to 30 days, and 14 is not unusual.
If you want to see what is currently available before we talk, my Silicon Valley property search runs off the live MLS feed.
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Living here after 60
This is the part of the market I have specialized in, and it is the part almost nobody writes about honestly, so I will spend some time on it. Roughly 16.3 percent of Santa Clara County residents are 65 or older, which is about 312,000 people, and a large share of them have lived in the same house for thirty or forty years.
If that is you, your situation has a specific shape. You are almost certainly equity-rich, often with a million and a half or two million dollars of appreciation in a house you bought for a fraction of that. You are also frequently cash-constrained, because the equity is locked in the walls and a fixed income does not stretch far against Silicon Valley costs. And your property tax bill, thanks to Prop 13, is a number you would never see again if you sold and rebought without planning for it. That last point is exactly why Prop 19 matters so much, and why sequencing a move properly can be worth more than everything else in the transaction combined.
The second problem is the housing stock. This valley built for young families with kids, which means stairs at the entry, stairs to the bedrooms, narrow doorways, step-in tubs, and laundry in the garage. Genuinely single-level homes with a flat approach are scarce, and they carry a real premium because everyone over 65 is looking for the same thing. I keep a running list of senior-friendly homes for sale in Silicon Valley for exactly this reason, along with Bay Area senior housing listings.
The third problem is logistics, and it is the one that stops more moves than money does. Forty years in one house means a garage, an attic, a shed and three closets that have to be dealt with, usually by people in their seventies whose adult children live in Seattle or Austin. Add a house that needs paint, a roof, and a kitchen that was last touched in 1984, and the whole thing feels impossible from the inside. It is not impossible, but it does need a plan and it does need the right people, and that is most of what I do. I have written up how I approach it on my downsizing page.
One more item that catches people: the federal capital gains exclusion on a primary residence is $250,000 for a single filer and $500,000 for a married couple, and those figures have not been adjusted since 1997. On a house bought for $180,000 and sold for $2.2 million, the exclusion covers a small slice of the gain and the rest is taxable. There are strategies around this, including timing, cost-basis documentation for every improvement you ever made, and in some cases holding the property into an estate. Talk to a CPA early, not in escrow.
If this is your situation, here is how I work with older homeowners and their families.
Who thrives here and who leaves
I have watched a lot of people arrive and a lot of people go, and the pattern is fairly consistent.
The people who thrive are the ones whose work is genuinely here and genuinely pays here, the ones who came for a specific community and found it, and the ones who actually use what this place offers. That last group is bigger than you would think. If you spend your weekends in the Santa Cruz Mountains, at the coast, in the Sierra four hours away, eating food from forty different countries within a ten mile radius, and going to things that happen here first, the premium starts to look like a reasonable trade.
The people who leave are usually the ones who came only for the paycheck. They arrive, look at what $1.9 million buys compared to what it would buy in Raleigh or Boise, spend two years resenting the house, and go. Families wanting space per dollar leave. Retirees without a specific reason to stay cash out and go to Nevada, Texas, Arizona, or up over the hill to Santa Cruz County where the money goes further and the pace drops.
Remote work changed this calculation more than anything else in my twenty-three years here. If your job is not physically located in this valley, the honest answer is that the premium is very hard to justify on numbers alone. You should be here because you want to be here, not because you have to be.
Common questions
Is Silicon Valley a good place to live?
It is, if your work or your community is here. The weather is close to perfect, the food is excellent, you have mountains and ocean within an hour, and the job market pays better than anywhere in the country. The costs are genuinely punishing and the housing stock is older and smaller than the price suggests. I go into more detail on whether Silicon Valley is a good place to live.
How much money do you need to live in Silicon Valley?
To rent comfortably, roughly $120,000 to $150,000 for a household, against a median gross rent of $2,857. To buy the median single-family home at $1.9 million with 20 percent down, you are looking at about $12,000 a month all in, which realistically means household income above $350,000 unless you are bringing equity from a prior home.
What is the median home price in Silicon Valley?
The median single-family resale price in Santa Clara County was $1,894,440 in August 2026. By city it ranges from about $1.4 million in San Jose to about $4.5 million in Los Altos.
Is Silicon Valley the same as the Bay Area?
No. The Bay Area is the nine-county region around San Francisco Bay, with about 7.7 million people. Silicon Valley is the southern portion of it, essentially Santa Clara County plus the southern Peninsula, and San Francisco itself is not part of it.
What are property taxes in Silicon Valley?
Your assessed value is set at your purchase price and rises no more than 2 percent a year under Prop 13. The rate is 1 percent plus voter-approved bonds, so most Santa Clara County bills land between about 1.1 and 1.35 percent of assessed value. On a $1.9 million purchase, budget roughly $22,000 to $25,000 a year.
What is the most affordable city in Silicon Valley?
Within Santa Clara County, Gilroy and Morgan Hill give you the most house per dollar, followed by parts of San Jose and Milpitas. The trade is commute time, which for Gilroy to the north valley is substantial.
Do you need a car in Silicon Valley?
For most people, yes. Caltrain, VTA light rail and BART all work well if your origin and destination both sit on the line, and a meaningful number of people in Mountain View, Sunnyvale and downtown San Jose get by without a car. Everywhere else the valley was built around driving and it shows.
Can I keep my low property tax bill if I move within California?
If you are 55 or older, yes, in most cases. Prop 19 lets you transfer your base year value to a replacement home anywhere in California, up to three times in your lifetime, as long as you complete both transactions within two years. The savings are often five figures a year, so it is worth getting the sequence right.
Want to talk it through?
I have lived and worked in this valley for more than two decades and I have handled over 450 transactions here, a lot of them for people who had owned the same house since before I had a license. If you are weighing a move into Silicon Valley, out of it, or across town, I am happy to give you an honest read on your specific situation with no pitch attached.
Book a call with me, or take a look at the individual Silicon Valley town profiles if you want to keep reading first.
Seb Frey is a Broker Associate with Compass in Los Gatos, California (DRE #01369847), with SRES and CSA designations and more than 450 closed transactions across Silicon Valley and Santa Cruz County. Market figures in this guide reflect August 2026 data from Redfin and the Santa Clara County MLS; demographic figures are from the U.S. Census Bureau. Last updated September 2026.
