The San Francisco Bay Area is so expensive that even high-earning tech employees at companies such as Apple, Google, and Amazon are putting off having kids because they are too expensive to raise, according to a new survey.
More than 58 percent of tech workers in the Golden Gate City agreed that “the rising cost of living has forced me to delay starting a family,” according to the survey conducted by Blind, an app that allows tech employees to have anonymous chats about the workplace.
A total of 8,284 people participated in the survey — most of them employees at 14 tech companies.
Shockingly, more than 69 percent of the Apple employees who participated said they have delayed starting a family due to the high cost of living. Cisco, with about 67 percent, and eBay and Uber — with about 64 percent each — were close behind. Just over 63 percent of Google employees who responded said that they too delayed having kids.
And between 50 to 59 percent of workers at Amazon, Intel, Lyft, Facebook, Booking.com, and Salesforce said high living expenses have prompted them to put off having kids.
Microsoft and Oracle employees were the only two companies where less than half of the respondents said they’d delayed starting families — with about 49 and 44 percent, respectively.
Although average yearly tech salaries in Bay Area are around a whopping $142,000 — according to a report by the website Hired — the median price of a home is more than four times the national average, around $900,000, Business Insider reported.
And the average cost of raising a child to age 18 in the U.S. today is about $230,000, according to a report by Merrill Lynch.
The delay in child-bearing isn’t exclusive to the Bay Area, a New York Times Survey revealed.
In a July poll of 1,858 men and women ages 20 to 45, 64 percent said they had or expected to have fewer children than they considered ideal because child care is too expensive. Forty-four percent said they can’t afford more children, and 43 percent said they waited because of financial instability.
