By the time Karen White and Adrian Kasbergen met on a dating app in 2021, they had been living on opposite sides of the sprawling Houston metro area for decades, each owning their own home. They soon started talking about marrying, retiring together, and moving to another part of the country, especially since neither was crazy about Houston’s steamy summers or power failures in the winter.
But where? They both had business backgrounds (he as a marketing manager with a computer company, she as an administrator with financial and energy firms). So, of course, they started plotting data on a large spreadsheet of possible future retirement places. Their “joint spreadsheet,’’ as White calls it, had columns for median home prices, plus a lot more—cost of living, crime rates, climate factors, healthcare factors, tax rates and so on.
In some respects, it resembled the way Forbes gathered information to pick the Best Places To Retire In 2026, though our work product was a lot bigger. We looked at nearly 1,000 locales to find 25 that offer the best retirement living at an affordable price. White and Kasbergen included just a handful of places on their spreadsheet.
As an interracial couple—she is African American and he is from the Netherlands—they wanted a racially diverse place with liberal politics, so they coded that in, too. (Forbes makes note of an area’s politics in our full profiles of chosen places, but that doesn’t figure into our selection process.) The couple also wanted a thriving arts scene, something we factor into Forbes’ annual list of the Best Places To Enjoy Your Retirement, which looks at the best places to pursue various passions without regard to cost.
“We didn’t want to give up on quality of life,” says Kasbergen, now 70. The spreadsheet eventually had 29 columns. “It got pretty wide,” adds White, 64.
The result of all that research and a long car trip: Two years ago, they bought a lot in Raleigh, North Carolina, the city they decided best met their requirements. In December 2025 they got married in Houston. This past March they moved 1,200 miles with their cat, Eva, to a Raleigh rental home just three blocks away from the lot where their new home is being built. They expect to move in by year’s end. “We’re going to watch it go up every day,” says an excited White.
This year is the fifth time in 12 years that fast-growing Raleigh, North Carolina’s capital city with a population of 517,000, has made our top 25 list. Raleigh’s key economic factors are within striking distance of national norms. The median home price in Raleigh is $434,000, 6% above the national median of $409,000, while the cost of living is also 6% more than the national average. As a college town (North Carolina State University, Shaw University) sitting in North Carolina’s famed high-tech Research Triangle, the area has a lot to offer, including good medical care.
Kasbergen moved from the Netherlands to the Houston area in 1999 for a job. But not for its notoriously hot and humid weather. “The heat was way too uncomfortable for me,” he says. White, who was born in Oregon and moved to Houston as a kid in 1969, also rattles off unpleasant weather factors around the Bayou City: “Four hurricanes in a row, the power grid going down from cold weather.”
After they got together, White rented out her house and moved 70 miles across Houston into Kasbergen’s larger home, which conveniently had a pool. They also plotted their getaway. They thought about places around the country and even in Europe (although Kasbergen has given up his Dutch citizenship). But with a temperate climate away from recurring hurricanes as an important factor, they eventually focused on spots in states in the southeastern part of the U.S., but not too far south or in portions too close to the Atlantic Coast.
They winnowed down the list to about a half-dozen places and visited them all during a two-week road trip in 2024, spending several days in each. They ruled out Charlottesville, Virginia, due to cost. With Kasbergen’s two grown children in Europe, White’s adult son in Virginia and both with friends everywhere, they eliminated Lexington, Kentucky; Greensboro, North Carolina; and Knoxville, Tennessee, for poor airline connections to much of the U.S. and Europe. (As it happens, Lexington did make our top 25 list.) Richmond, Virginia, they just didn’t like.
But they fell in love with the vibe of Raleigh, a liberal bastion in a moderate-to-conservative state. While Texas has no state income tax, North Carolina just lowered its own income tax rate to a flat 3.99%, with a complete exemption for Social Security, and no state estate or inheritance tax. Moreover, Houston-area property taxes as a percentage of a home’s value are, on average, more than double the rates around Raleigh, according to the Tax Foundation, an authoritative research group. The couple decided that tax-wise, the move would be a fair trade.
Back in Houston, they spent a lot of time looking online at Raleigh’s real estate sites. They spotted a listing for an empty lot in the city’s Village Lakes area on the southeast side. The parcel become vacant after the prior home burned down in a fire. Sight unseen (but after doing a lot of online research), they bought it. The plan for the new house is to downsize about 40% from Kasbergen’s 4,700-square-foot Houston home. “We don’t need as much space,” he says.
This year, the Forbes Best Retirement Places list here features cities in 21 states across all four domestic time zones. We collect data on nearly 1,000 places with populations above 10,000 in every state, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, including some suggested by Forbes readers. We focus on financial factors, including median home prices and overall cost of living and how they compare to national metrics. Since this is Forbes, we also review a number of state tax issues, such as marginal income tax rates, state income tax exemptions for Social Security benefits and other retirement income, and the existence of state estate or inheritance taxes.
Quality of retirement life matters, so we examine some non-economic indicators. We eliminate places with far too high rates of serious crime compared to national averages or way too few primary care doctors per capita. We take into consideration factors that promote an active retirement, including air quality and ratings for walkability (how easy it is to shop and get to places on foot) and bikeability (whether dedicated lanes and other measures make it easy to bike around town). While the data underlying the list is quantitative, our final picks are qualitative, reflecting our judgments.
For the seventh year, we assessed each area’s vulnerability to climate change and natural disaster risk, primarily using the National Risk Index for Natural Hazards published by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). This calculates for every county, including municipalities in Puerto Rico, a vulnerability measure encompassing 18 natural hazards, including flooding, hurricanes, landslides, earthquakes and wind. We automatically exclude places assigned a “very high” risk rating.
Sources for our data include: the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, FEMA, the Tax Foundation, individual state tax departments, zillow.com, trulia.com, bestplaces.net, neighborhoodscout.com, the National Association of Realtors, countyhealthrankings.org, walkscore.com, state or local election agencies, and official local websites.
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