Living in Sioux Falls, SD

It's elevated — there's no way to sugarcoat a violent crime index of 132 when the national average sits at 100. Property crime is at 97. That said, city-wide averages hide a lot of variation. There are safe, quiet neighborhoods in Sioux Falls where people raise families without much worry. The key is doing granular research: talk to residents, check precinct-level data, and visit at different times of day before signing a lease. FBI UCR numbers.

Rent in Sioux Falls is genuinely cheap relative to what people earn here. Median rent is $993/month and median household income is $74,714/year — that's a 15.9% rent-to-income ratio, which is rare in today's housing market. Lower demand, cheaper land, or strong local wages could all be factors. Whatever the cause, your dollar stretches further here than in most places. Census ACS 2023.

The average worker in Sioux Falls spends about 15 minutes getting to the office. Driving solo is the default (79.4%), with 9.4% working remotely and 0.7% on public transit. It's a fairly typical commute — not a selling point, not a dealbreaker.

Moderate to light. The total effective tax rate in Sioux Falls — combining income, property, and sales taxes — is about 7.7%. Sales tax is 6.5%. That's below the national midpoint. Whether you feel the difference depends on your income bracket and whether you own property, but on the whole, Sioux Falls won't surprise you with an outsized tax bill.

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.