Living in Portland, ME

By the numbers, Portland is one of the safer cities in the country. The violent crime index lands at 29 — for context, the national baseline is 100, so anything under 50 is unusually low. Property crime follows the same trend at 64. No city is entirely without risk, and certain blocks are always going to be different from others, but the overall picture here is strong. Source: FBI Uniform Crime Report.

Housing costs in Portland are reasonable. Median rent sits at $1,487/month with median household income at $76,174/year — a 23.4% rent-to-income ratio. That's well within the comfort zone that most financial advisors recommend. It's not dirt cheap, but most working households can afford rent here without financial strain. Other costs like groceries and utilities will vary, but the rent picture is solid. Census ACS 2023 data.

The average worker in Portland spends about 16 minutes getting to the office. Driving solo is the default (56.1%), with 21.5% working remotely and 2.7% on public transit. It's a fairly typical commute — not a selling point, not a dealbreaker.

Everything on this page is built from public government sources: rent and income figures from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS 5-Year Estimates, 2023); commute and transportation data from Census ACS tables B08303 and B08006; crime rates from the FBI Uniform Crime Report. We refresh each dataset monthly through an automated pipeline and cross-check for anomalies. No surveys, no user-submitted guesses — just official federal data presented in a way that's actually useful for people researching a move.