America’s 10 Most Expensive Cities to Host Christmas This Year—The Top 3 Are All in the Same State

The holiday season can always be a stressful time of year, but if it falls to you to play host on the big day, then all that festive stress and upheaval can come with the unwelcome addition of a rather big bill, too.

Buying in enough food, drink, gifts, decorations, and Christmas entertainment for you and your extended family all too quickly adds up—and now, a new study by digital entertainment platform JB.com has sought to uncover precisely which cities make the most expensive Christmas hosts in the United States.

How the List is Calculated

The study’s authors compared the average local prices of various aspects of the Christmas period across the 25 biggest cities in the United States.

Among the many variables the study took into consideration were the local cost of Christmas trees, holiday decorations, and traditional holiday food—specifically, the average cost of hosting a traditional Christmas dinner for six people, including such typical fare as meat, potatoes, greens, onions, bottles of wine, milk, eggs, bread, and soft drinks.

All these costs were then combined, with the 25 cities in the study then ranked from most to least expensive when it comes to the cost of hosting the holidays. 

The Top 10 List of Most Expensive Hosting Cities

Coming out on top in the study, San Francisco, California, was found to be the most expensive of all U.S. cities at Christmastime, with the average family here typically spending around $545 in total for all the necessary festivities.

A six-person Christmas dinner alone in San Francisco averaged a staggering $181—more than any other city in the study—while the average cost of a Christmas tree here was $82, the joint second-highest figure overall. 

Not far behind, San Diego, California, came in second place in the study, with an average cost for Christmas there coming to $524. San Diego tied with San Francisco for the cost of its Christmas trees and Christmas decorations (with locals typically spending $282 on festive décor), but the cost of a Christmas dinner here was somewhat lower than elsewhere, coming in at an average of $160. 

Making it three for three at the top end of the rankings, meanwhile, Los Angeles came in third place overall in the study, with Christmas here totaling an average of $520, likewise based on a $282 outlay on decorations, and a $156 Christmas dinner.

Not far behind, in fourth place, a typical Christmas in New York City—the most expensive East Coast city by far—came in at $514 in total, thanks in no small part to the costliest Christmas trees in the entire study: you can expect a traditional New York Christmas tree to set you back $90 on average. 

San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, and New York were in fact the only cities in the study where Christmas was found to cost over $500.

From the Big Apple in fourth place, there was quite a considerable drop in price to fifth-place Boston, Massachusetts, where the average cost of hosting the holidays came in at $469. Christmas food and drink were still rather expensive here, however, with the average Christmas dinner setting Boston families back around $162—no doubt thanks in part to the most expensive kilo of potatoes of all cities in the study, at $4.36.

But the average cost of a Christmas tree here came in at $72, while the average family spends far less on Christmas decorations in Boston, with festive décor here totaling $235. 

The rest of the top 10 was comprised of Nashville ($414) and New Orleans ($413, with families here spending just $184 on Christmas decorations, the lowest total at the top of the rankings), followed by three cities in Texas: Dallas in eighth ($409), Austin in ninth ($401) and Houston in tenth ($400).

All of the Texan cities had the cheapest Christmas trees overall in the top 10, with the average tree here costing just $59, while Houston had the cheapest Christmas food bill of all the cities at the top of the list, coming in at $134 overall.

At the bottom end of the study, meanwhile, the city where hosting Christmas was found to be the cheapest was Miami, Florida, where a Christmas dinner for six averaged out at just $110, a Christmas tree costs $45, and the typical family spends $130 on decorations, for a total of $285 overall—almost half that of the average cost of hosting Christmas in San Francisco.

Other cities that came in with similarly frugal totals were Detroit ($309), Orlando ($324), Charlotte ($325), and Philadelphia ($330). 

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