Minnesota’s 35% can’t cover basics. The average still spent $26,000 on them.

The report counts households. The books count averages.

Rochester residents told KAAL they had dropped name-brand groceries, combined cars and winced at $100 fill-ups after an ALICE report found 35 percent of Minnesota households do not have the income to cover basic needs. The station’s grocery examples were homely on purpose: milk about a dollar more than a decade ago, beef almost twice as expensive as in 2016. Economist Mike Walden said wages were not keeping up. That is a distribution story — a household survival budget — and the official national accounts cannot rerun ALICE’s worksheet. What they can do is show how large the same categories already were, on average, before 2025 and 2026 piled on another year of prices.

The latest state consumption accounts run through 2024. They are per person, not per household, and they include children, retirees and high spenders in the same average. They also impute rent for people who own their homes. None of that is a household checkbook. It is still the cleanest official map of how much Minnesota already spends on the things ALICE calls basics.

Four tickets already cost $26,000 a head

In 2024, Minnesota spent $3,766 per person on food and beverages bought for home, $10,132 on housing and utilities, $10,567 on health-care services and $1,482 on gasoline and other energy goods. Add those four lines and the bill is $25,947 — 44.4 percent of the state’s $58,433 in total per-person consumption. Health care here is outpatient, hospital and nursing-home services, not insurance premiums. Food includes alcohol purchased for home use. Housing includes tenant rent, an imputed rent for owner-occupied dwellings, and utilities. Those caveats matter, and they do not make the total small.

The composition is lopsided in a way the grocery-aisle interviews understate. Housing and health care dwarf the supermarket. Food at home was only 6.4 percent of Minnesota spending in 2024; gasoline and other energy goods were 2.5 percent. The two medical-and-shelter lines were 17.3 and 18.1 percent. If a third of households cannot cover “basics,” the official average says the expensive basics are not the cereal box. They are the roof and the clinic.

Minnesota’s total per-person consumption in 2024, $58,433, was almost identical to the U.S. average of $58,499. The mix was not. Minnesotans spent less than the country on groceries ($3,766 versus $4,350) and a little less on housing ($10,132 versus $10,595). They spent more on health-care services ($10,567 versus $9,747) and more on gasoline and other energy goods ($1,482 versus $1,295). The $100 fill-up is visible in the fuel line. The name-brand freeze is visible in a grocery bill that is still rising but remains cheaper, per person, than the national average.

Minnesota’s grocery, housing, health and fuel bills per person

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year	total_pce	food	housing	health	gasoline	basics	food_share	housing_share	health_share	gas_share	basics_share	income	real_income
2010	36024	2513	6353	6384	1349	16599	7	17.6	17.7	3.7	46.1	42538	48225
2011	37337	2619	6349	6534	1670	17172	7	17	17.5	4.5	46	45134	50086
2012	38165	2715	6538	6657	1664	17574	7.1	17.1	17.4	4.4	46	47399	51554
2013	39023	2719	6764	6856	1616	17955	7	17.3	17.6	4.1	46	47413	50857
2014	40100	2707	6897	7104	1551	18259	6.8	17.2	17.7	3.9	45.5	49357	51761
2015	41010	2732	7058	7361	1183	18334	6.7	17.2	17.9	2.9	44.7	51353	54124
2016	42020	2803	7178	7728	1051	18760	6.7	17.1	18.4	2.5	44.6	51982	54535
2017	43519	2887	7398	7862	1161	19308	6.6	17	18.1	2.7	44.4	53826	55771
2018	45228	2978	7644	8257	1290	20169	6.6	16.9	18.3	2.9	44.6	56201	55408
2019	45930	3028	7927	8407	1230	20592	6.6	17.3	18.3	2.7	44.8	57903	56749
2020	43698	3281	7732	7758	923	19694	7.5	17.7	17.8	2.1	45.1	61372	60139
2021	48947	3467	8515	8686	1334	22002	7.1	17.4	17.7	2.7	45	67730	63244
2022	53437	3667	9434	9103	1740	23944	6.9	17.7	17	3.3	44.8	69467	61533
2023	55825	3699	9592	9822	1564	24677	6.6	17.2	17.6	2.8	44.2	72674	61394
2024	58433	3766	10132	10567	1482	25947	6.4	17.3	18.1	2.5	44.4	75548	62039

Four “basic” categories already take 44% of Minnesota spending

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category	dollars	share
Food at home	3766	6.4
Housing and utilities	10132	17.3
Health care	10567	18.1
Gasoline and other energy goods	1482	2.5
All other spending	32486	55.6

Since 2016, the paycheck looked bigger than it spent

KAAL’s beef comparison started in 2016. From that year through 2024, Minnesota’s per-person grocery bill rose 34.4 percent, housing and utilities 41.2 percent, health-care services 36.7 percent and gasoline and other energy goods 41.0 percent. Total consumption was up 39.1 percent. Nominal per-capita personal income, which includes wages, benefits, proprietors’ income and transfers, rose faster still: from $51,982 in 2016 to $75,548 in 2024, or 45.3 percent, and to $78,538 in 2025, according to BEA’s annual state income summary. On paper, the average Minnesotan’s income outran the grocery and rent lines.

Strip out prices and the story changes. Real per-capita personal income, in 2017 dollars after regional prices, rose only 13.8 percent from 2016 to 2024 — from $54,535 to $62,039. The U.S. average rose 18.8 percent over the same stretch. Minnesota still sits above the country. It no longer pulls away. Real income peaked in 2021, sagged in 2022 and 2023, and in 2024 remained below that peak. Walden’s remark that raises are not covering the cost of living is the version of this chart you can feel at the pump. The nominal raise showed up. The purchasing power mostly did not.

That is also why an average cannot argue with ALICE. If a third of households are short of a basic-needs budget, they are not living at the per-person mean. They are living in the left tail, where a 14 percent real raise over eight years is not a raise at all once rent, a second car and a clinic visit land in the same month. The accounts say the state’s typical consumption basket is not exotic. They do not say the bottom third can buy it.

Since 2016, Minnesota’s real pay rose far less than the grocery and rent bills

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year	food_index	housing_index	health_index	gas_index	total_pce_index	income_index	real_income_index
2010	89.7	88.5	82.6	128.4	85.7	81.8	88.4
2011	93.4	88.5	84.5	158.9	88.9	86.8	91.8
2012	96.9	91.1	86.1	158.3	90.8	91.2	94.5
2013	97	94.2	88.7	153.8	92.9	91.2	93.3
2014	96.6	96.1	91.9	147.6	95.4	95	94.9
2015	97.5	98.3	95.3	112.6	97.6	98.8	99.2
2016	100	100	100	100	100	100	100
2017	103	103.1	101.7	110.5	103.6	103.5	102.3
2018	106.2	106.5	106.8	122.7	107.6	108.1	101.6
2019	108	110.4	108.8	117	109.3	111.4	104.1
2020	117.1	107.7	100.4	87.8	104	118.1	110.3
2021	123.7	118.6	112.4	126.9	116.5	130.3	116
2022	130.8	131.4	117.8	165.6	127.2	133.6	112.8
2023	132	133.6	127.1	148.8	132.9	139.8	112.6
2024	134.4	141.2	136.7	141	139.1	145.3	113.8

Minnesota still out-earns the country. The gap stopped widening.

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year	minnesota	united_states
2008	49842	45816
2009	46732	44204
2010	48225	44808
2011	50086	45957
2012	51554	46796
2013	50857	46358
2014	51761	47661
2015	54124	49396
2016	54535	49828
2017	55771	51006
2018	55408	52242
2019	56749	53683
2020	60139	56514
2021	63244	59365
2022	61533	57104
2023	61394	58088
2024	62039	59195

The expensive neighbor is still cheaper than America

Among the states that share a border or a labor market with Minnesota, the 2024 housing-and-utilities bill is highest in Minnesota. South Dakota spent $8,013 per person, Iowa $8,245, North Dakota $8,494, Michigan $9,175 and Wisconsin $9,184. Minnesota’s $10,132 sits below the U.S. average of $10,595 and well above every neighbor in that group. Groceries do not follow the same ranking: Iowa’s food-at-home bill was $4,093 per person, Wisconsin’s $4,037, North Dakota’s $3,810 and South Dakota’s $3,641, against Minnesota’s $3,766. The supermarket is not where Minnesota stands out. The house is.

Prices help explain the gap without erasing it. Minnesota’s housing regional price parity in 2024 was 91.3, with the U.S. equal to 100, and its all-items parity was 98.6, according to BEA’s regional price parities. In plain English, tenant rents used to build the housing index were cheaper than the national average, and the overall consumption basket was a shade cheaper too. A high housing bill next to a below-average housing price level is a quantity-and-quality story as much as a sticker-price story: bigger units, more owner-occupied imputed rent, or both. It is not a finding that Minnesota rents like Manhattan.

Put the four basic lines against income and the average still has room — which is exactly what an average is for. In 2024 those lines were 34.3 percent of per-capita personal income; all consumption was 77.3 percent. In 2016 the same basics were 36.1 percent of income. The share did not explode. Real income simply stopped doing the work households thought a raise would do. The ALICE threshold is a household budget for working people who earn more than poverty and less than stability. The official books cannot count those households. They can say that even at the mean, Minnesota’s roof and clinic already cost more than the neighbors’, that groceries and fuel kept climbing after 2016, and that after inflation the paycheck that was supposed to cover them grew by 14 percent in eight years. That is enough to make a 35 percent figure sound less like a scold and more like arithmetic.

Minnesota’s housing bill is the highest among its neighbors

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state	housing	food	total	housing_share	food_share	food_plus_housing	food_plus_housing_share
South Dakota	8013	3641	54100	14.8	6.7	11654	21.5
Iowa	8245	4093	49473	16.7	8.3	12338	24.9
North Dakota	8494	3810	58090	14.6	6.6	12304	21.2
Michigan	9175	—	54197	16.9	—	—	—
Wisconsin	9184	4037	54705	16.8	7.4	13221	24.2
Minnesota	10132	3766	58433	17.3	6.4	13898	23.8
United States	10595	4350	58499	18.1	7.4	14945	25.5