This Is the Most Expensive Zip Code in America

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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This Is the Most Expensive Zip Code in America

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Americans are obsessed with stories about the very wealthy. The interest has been peaked by new legislation moving through Congress, and the wealth many people have gained due to the rising stock market.

Several members of Congress suggested that the 700 billionaire families in the United States should pay a special tax to underwrite programs in new legislation, particularly those that help the poor. It appears that plan has been abandoned, but it is almost certainly the tax levels of the very rich will rise.

The sharp spike in the stock market has increased the net worths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. This is most evident among billionaires who own or are major shareholders in publicly held companies. A new class of super-billionaires has emerged, led by Elon Musk of Tesla, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook (Meta).

The overall increase of wealth among the well-off has driven demand for very high-end homes. Most home prices have risen in the United States. The Washington Post pointed out about luxury home sales earlier this year: “Meanwhile, data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) shows a 244.5 percent increase in the number of home sales in the United States priced above $1 million year over year in May.”
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Property Shark’s recently released “Most Expensive U.S. Zip Codes in 2021: 10 Areas Surpass $4 Million Median Sale Price” was based on residential transactions made between January 1, 2021, and October 22, 2021. This included condos, co-ops and single- and two-family homes. A Zip code was only included if there were three transactions over the measured period. Median home prices were rounded to the closest $1,000.

The data show a cluster of extremely expensive Zip codes around Los Angeles and San Francisco, each with three of the top 10. The Boston, New York, Seattle and Miami areas had one each.

Atherton, near San Francisco, has the most expensive Zip code for the fifth year in a row. The median sale price of a home was $7.4 million. That was almost $2 million ahead of the next Zip code by the same measure, which is in Boston.

The 10 most expensive Zip codes in America:

Zip Location Median Price
94027 Atherton, Calif. $7,475,000
02199 Boston, Mass. $5,500,000
11962 Sagaponack, N.Y. $5,000,000
94957 Ross, Calif. $4,583,000
33109 Miami Beach, Fla. $4,475,000
90210 Beverly Hills, Calif. $4,125,000
93108 Santa Barbara, Calif. $4,103,000
90402 Santa Monica, Calif. $4,058,000
94022 Los Altos, Calif. $4,052,000
98039 Medina, Wash. $4,000,000

Click here to see which are the most expensive cities in which to buy a house.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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