The Housing Wage In Ski Country Just Passed Double Minimum Wage
Colorado renters now need $36.44 an hour to afford a two bedroom apartment while the state minimum sits at $15.36, and the counties driving that gap are Summit, Eagle, and Pitkin, the same three that keep the lifts running.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition put a number on something I have been watching for years. In its Out of Reach 2026 report, NLIHC calculated that a worker in Colorado now needs to earn $36.44 an hour to afford a modest two bedroom apartment without spending more than a third of income on rent. The state minimum wage is $15.36. That is more than 2.3 times minimum wage, and it puts Colorado 12th on the list of least affordable states in the country. The report names the most expensive counties in the state as Summit, Eagle, Pitkin, Boulder, and Denver. Three of those five are ski counties. Summit is Breckenridge and Keystone. Eagle is Vail and Beaver Creek. Pitkin is Aspen and Snowmass.
The national picture is not much better. NLIHC puts the national two bedroom housing wage at $34.73 an hour against an average renter wage of $24.84, a gap of nearly ten dollars an hour. Workers in eighteen common occupations, almost half the workforce, earn below that two bedroom housing wage, including the jobs that keep a resort running: lift operations, food and beverage, housekeeping, entry level ski patrol.
At the same time, capital is pouring into the mountains at a pace I have not seen in a while. Alterra Mountain Company just announced more than $350 million in resort investment for the coming season, terrain expansion at Deer Valley, a new high speed lift at Tremblant, avalanche mitigation at Mammoth and Palisades Tahoe, a ten million gallon snowmaking reservoir. Buried in that release, for the first time in a while, employee housing shows up as its own stated focus area rather than getting folded into general capex. That is a real signal. It is also a small fraction of a capital plan that size, against a wage gap that large.
Meanwhile Vail Resorts priced the full Epic Pass at $1,089 for adults for the coming season, with a discount for skiers under 30. NOAA's outlook calls for a strong El Nino pattern this winter, with above average precipitation across California, Arizona, New Mexico, and most of Colorado. Good snow means a good season, more skiers, more pressure on a workforce that increasingly cannot afford to live anywhere near the resort that employs it.
I have made this argument before and the data keeps confirming it. You cannot treat workforce housing as a subsidy bolted onto a resort's capital plan and expect it to hold up over a full cycle. The math only works when housing is anchored to the employer the way a headquarters anchors an office building, underwritten as core infrastructure, not charity. That is the model behind Oldivai, deed restricted units tied to jobs in the resort economy, priced against what a lift operator or a ski patroller actually earns, not against market rent set by second home buyers.
The wage gap in Summit, Eagle, and Pitkin is not a mystery anyone needs to solve. It is arithmetic that resort operators, employers, and local governments already have in front of them. Alterra putting employee housing on its own line is a sign the industry is starting to notice. A $350 million capital plan and a housing wage that requires 2.3 times the state minimum are still not pointed at each other with any real urgency. The resorts that connect those two numbers first will have a much easier time staffing the mountain than the ones still treating it as a public relations problem.
If you are underwriting employer anchored or workforce housing in a resort community and want to compare notes on what actually pencils, reach out. I would rather trade numbers with someone building this than watch another capital plan skip past the line that matters most.
About the Author
I have spent years building in mountain resort communities and other housing markets across the Mountain West, Texas, Florida, and Vermont, and these days most of my attention is on the wage gap this piece describes. My current focus, through Oldivai, is employer anchored workforce housing built for the people who actually keep resort communities running.
Reach me at Daniel@kaufmanredev.com or find more at danielkaufmanre.com.
