The $110 Billion You Can Hear: What Traffic Noise Does to Property Values

More than 42 million Americans live in census tracts with medium or high
traffic noise. Until recently, nobody had put a credible national price tag
on that. In September 2025, economists Enrico Moretti (Berkeley) and Harrison
Wheeler (Toronto) did exactly that in NBER Working Paper 34298 — and the
number is $110 billion, capitalized directly into home prices.

How you price something you can only hear

The clever part of the study is the identification. You can't just compare
noisy streets to quiet ones — noisy streets differ in a dozen other ways.
Instead, the authors tracked what happened to home prices when highway
noise barriers were built in Florida (1,143 of them, against 497 that
were proposed but never built, across 596,419 home sales).

The result: prices within 100 metres of a new barrier jumped 6.8% —
immediately and permanently — for an average abatement of about 7 decibels.
That works out to roughly 0.95% of home value per decibel of noise.
No pre-trends, no air-quality confound, no view-blocking artifact. It's the
cleanest causal estimate of the price of quiet yet published.

The uncomfortable findings

Two things stand out for anyone who works with locations:

1. The cost is wildly uneven across cities. Boston residents bear about
$1,310 per person in capitalized noise costs; Atlanta residents about $100.
The difference is proximity to major roads and — critically — property
values: the same decibel costs more where homes cost more.

2. It's regressive. Lower-income and minority neighborhoods sit closer
to the loud infrastructure, so they carry a disproportionate share of the
burden — while owning less of the housing that would benefit from quiet.

What we did with it

We built the paper's methodology into our site reports:

• US exposure comes from the same public dataset the researchers used —

the US DOT National Transportation Noise Map (2020, 30-metre modeling
grid), aggregated to census tracts.

• Canadian exposure has no public noise map, so we model a proxy from

the street network and our calibrated traffic-volume estimates — always
labeled as modeled, never passed off as measurement.

• The dollar figure applies the paper's willingness-to-pay per decibel

to local median home values, shown as a range with the citation attached.

A report now says not just "this site averages 62 dB" but "that exposure
implies an estimated $45,000–$105,000 capitalized discount on the median
home here, per NBER W34298." A range grounded in research — not a
prediction. (Our standing rule: we never forecast anyone's revenue or
property value. We show you the evidence and the error bars.)

You can browse county-level exposure and cost estimates on our
noise data pages, or see the full methodology on the
method page.

Why this matters for site selection

Noise cuts both ways in a location decision. For a relocating family,
it's a livability cost — the study's numbers say buyers treat it exactly
that way. For a franchise operator, arterial noise usually rides along
with the traffic that feeds the business — the question isn't "is it loud"
but "is the loudness the productive kind." Our scoring profiles weight it
accordingly: heavily for relocation decisions, as a patio-and-dwell
consideration for food service.

One more wrinkle from the paper worth knowing: electric vehicles are about
7 decibels quieter at neighborhood speeds. Universal EV adoption would be
worth an estimated $77.3 billion in noise reduction alone — concentrated
in exactly the dense, lower-income urban areas that carry today's burden.
The quietest streets of 2035 may be ones that are loud today. That's a
trade-area trend worth watching.

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*Source: Moretti, E. & Wheeler, H. (2025). "The Traffic Noise Externality:
Costs, Incidence and Policy Implications." NBER Working Paper 34298.
Exposure data: US DOT/BTS National Transportation Noise Map (2020), tract
aggregation per Seto & Huang (2023).*