erhaps the most discouraging statistic in the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development’s cost of living publication is the Affordability Index. That measures how many monthly paychecks it takes to afford a 30-year mortgage on a typical house. In most places, the number of paychecks is more than one, which strikes a blow to the traditional vision of a single-earner household.

The encouraging part of that statistic, though, is that there is at least one place where the single-earner household can exist: in Fairbanks, the Affordability Index is less than one paycheck per household.

At 4.9 percent, price increases in 2021 in Alaska were the highest since 1990, and they only ballooned going into 2022. While inflation retreated as the year progressed, 2022 is liable to end up with double-digit increases. Still, state economist Neal Fried likes to point out that Alaska had annual inflation above 5 percent from 1974 to 1982, yet those were Alaska’s boom years, albeit for once-in-a-lifetime reasons. His point is that high inflation doesn’t have to spell economic doom.

This edition of Alaska Trends checks the cost of living across Alaska and over time.