California commuters are paying a brutal price just to punch the clock and, surprisingly, Los Angeles drivers don’t even have it the worst.
California claimed a whopping four spots among the nation’s 10 most expensive commutes, with San Francisco and San Jose taking the top two spots, according to a new ConsumerAffairs analysis.
The rankings combine the estimated value of commuting time with fuel costs using wage, Census commute-time, federal driving and AAA gas-price data.
Workers in the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metro area face an estimated annual commuting cost of a staggering $10,902, while those in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area shell out the equivalent of $10,636 a year.
Stockton-Lodi landed further down the list at $8,362 annually, while the notoriously traffic-clogged Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro clocked in at $8,270.
Washington, D.C. and New York were also among the priciest places in America to get to work.
ConsumerAffairs calculated the totals by looking beyond what drivers fork over at the gas pump. Researchers also put a price tag on something commuters may overlook, the hours they spend getting to and from work without getting paid.
For someone working an eight-hour shift with a half-hour commute each way, that effectively turns an eight-hour job into a nine-hour daily commitment.
Over hundreds of workdays, those unpaid hours can add up to thousands of dollars in lost time.
And nowhere does that sting quite like the Bay Area.
San Francisco-area workers spend an average of 62 minutes commuting round-trip each day, according to the analysis. With a median hourly wage of $35.70, that amounts to roughly 259 hours a year on the move, nearly 11 full days.
Then there’s the pump pain.
ConsumerAffairs used a California gas price of $5.65 per gallon in its calculation, pushing estimated annual fuel costs for San Francisco commuters to $1,643, the highest in the country.
San Jose wasn’t far behind in the overall rankings, despite its shorter average round-trip commute of 53 minutes.
The Silicon Valley metro has the highest median hourly wage in the country at $40.41, making all that unpaid travel time particularly costly. Workers there spend more than 222 hours a year commuting, with the value of that time estimated at $8,993 annually.
San Jose’s inflation-adjusted commuting costs also jumped 30.4% over the past decade.
UCLA urban planning professor Evelyn Blumenberg said housing choices can help explain why workers end up spending so much time on the road.
As metropolitan areas have expanded, some workers seeking more affordable homes have moved farther from employment centers, trading cheaper housing for longer trips to work. Blumenberg said metro size, congestion, transportation mode and worker characteristics are all closely associated with commute times.
California’s showing may not come as much of a shock considering its cities also routinely rank among America’s most expensive places to live.
Separate 2025 cost-of-living data from the Council for Community and Economic Research ranked San Jose as California’s most expensive urban area and second nationally behind Manhattan. San Francisco ranked sixth nationwide, just behind Los Angeles.
For workers desperate to give their wallets and themselves a break, heading south or toward the Midwest could help.
The ConsumerAffairs report found the least expensive commutes among the 100 largest metros were in McAllen and El Paso, Texas; Wichita, Kansas; Toledo, Ohio; and Greenville, North Carolina.
The calculations don’t include other wallet-busters such as tolls, parking, maintenance, insurance or differences in vehicle efficiency — meaning for some commuters, the true price of getting to work could be even higher.
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