10 Best Towns in the United States for Retirees

Everybody pictures retirement a little differently. One person wants a fishing boat and a long Alaska summer. Another wants a warm Florida lake and grandkids an hour away. The ten American towns here each answer a different version of that wish. Some keep a house near $220,000. A couple climb into seven figures and earn it. What links them is a walkable center and open country close enough to reach before lunch.

Traverse City, Michigan

Traverse City grows cherries and presses wine, which surprises people who picture the Midwest as flat farm country. The town holds about 15,600 people. Cherry Capital Airport connects to the larger hubs, and Munson Medical Center runs a 24-hour emergency room inside the city.

A summer afternoon goes to the beach at Clinch Park. A winter one goes to the tasting rooms on Old Mission Peninsula, where a good number of wineries stay open through the cold months. The Dennos Museum Center keeps one of the larger collections of Inuit art in the country and runs a regular schedule of exhibitions.

Galena, Illinois

Galena held around 3,000 people at the 2020 census. Its main street climbs a hill lined with 1800s storefronts, and partway up sits the house the city gave Ulysses S. Grant when he came home from the Civil War.

The Mississippi River runs less than ten miles west. The town calendar leans practical, with beekeeping classes and craft nights at the library, and there are working wineries out in the surrounding hills. A typical Galena home runs about $220,000, which is a fraction of what the resort towns on this list charge.

Montrose, Colorado

Montrose sits at the gateway to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, where the walls drop more than 2,000 feet to the river in places. In town, the Ute Indian Museum stands on land once owned by Chief Ouray and Chipeta and holds artifacts tied directly to the Ute people.

Skiers can reach Ouray, Ridgway, Telluride, Delta, and Grand Junction within a couple of hours. The price gap is the point. A typical Telluride home runs into the millions; Montrose stays under half a million.

Mount Dora, Florida

Mount Dora gives Florida retirees water without the coastal price tag. The town of roughly 19,000 sits on Lake Dora and touches smaller lakes like Loch Leven and Lake Gertrude. Residents take boat tours, paddle the shoreline, or walk the lakefront paths.

Orlando and Disney World are under an hour south. About a third of Mount Dora residents are 65 or older, one of the higher shares in the state. Emergency care is close at hand, with HCA Florida Mount Dora Emergency and a UF Health urgent care center both in town.

North Adams, Massachusetts

North Adams runs under 13,000 people and houses MASS MoCA, a contemporary art museum that opened in 1999 inside a former mill complex of more than two dozen buildings. It ranks among the largest contemporary art centers in the country. Natural Bridge State Park starts within the city limits and holds the only natural white marble arch in North America, cut by glacial meltwater more than 13,000 years ago.

This is the affordable corner of the Berkshires. A North Adams home sells for around $240,000, while the statewide median runs well past $600,000. The art crowd and the mountain scenery come without the price of the better-known New England towns south of here.

Silver City, New Mexico

Silver City wears its mining-boom past on Bullard Street, a stretch of brick storefronts that now holds galleries, a clay studio, and the Silco Theater, a 1923 movie house the town brought back to life in 2016. About a quarter of the roughly 9,500 residents are 65 or older, and many came for the dry high-desert air and a cost of living well below the national line. The town sits about 6,000 feet up, so the summers stay easier than the desert below.

This is a base camp as much as a town. The Western New Mexico University Museum holds one of the largest collections of Mimbres pottery anywhere, the black-on-white bowls the area is known for. Drive 44 miles up the winding NM 15 and you reach the Gila Cliff Dwellings, where Mogollon families built rooms into five cliff caves in the late 1200s and walked away by about 1300. The Gila Wilderness around them became the first protected wilderness area in the country in 1924, and a hot spring or two sits within a short hike of the road.

Ojai, California

Ojai holds fewer than 8,000 permanent residents and charges far more than most towns here. The money buys a wellness economy: the spa at the Ojai Valley Inn, the meditation gardens at Meditation Mount, and a downtown that bans formula chain storefronts by ordinance.

Santa Barbara is under an hour away over the pass. Community Memorial Hospital handles emergencies and on-site imaging in town. The draw is a mild valley climate, the hot springs nearby, and a walkable center where the same arcade has stood since the 1910s.

Homer, Alaska

Homer is a fishing town of about 6,000 at the end of the road on Kachemak Bay, and it has long pulled in painters and potters. The Pratt Museum lays out the natural history of the bay and the story of the people who fish it. South Peninsula Hospital covers local medical needs.

Kachemak Bay State Park sits across the water, and the drive to Seward opens onto Kenai Fjords National Park and its tidewater glaciers. Out on the Homer Spit, the Salty Dawg Saloon still operates inside an old 1897 cabin under a lighthouse-shaped tower. The winters are long and dark, and the oysters and the halibut are the trade-off.

Chincoteague, Virginia

On the Eastern Shore of Virginia, Chincoteague holds around 3,300 people on its own island. Summer tourists keep the town busy, then leave it quiet the rest of the year. Assateague Island and its undeveloped beaches sit a short drive across the channel.

The island is known for the wild ponies that Marguerite Henry put in her 1947 book "Misty of Chincoteague," and the herd still swims the channel at the late-July Pony Penning. Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge draws birdwatchers to the marshes year-round. About a third of residents are 65 or older, so the year-round community skews toward retirees.

Florence, Oregon

Florence sits where the Siuslaw River meets the Oregon Dunes, one of the largest stretches of coastal sand dunes in the world. Retirees walk the beaches, watch for the threatened western snowy plover, or ride a dune buggy out across the sand. Eleven miles up the coast, an elevator drops into Sea Lion Caves, the largest sea cave in the United States, where Steller sea lions haul out by the hundreds in winter.

Eugene is about an hour inland. PeaceHealth Peace Harbor Medical Center runs a 24-hour emergency and trauma department in town. A day here splits between the dunes in the morning and the riverfront shops and seafood docks of Old Town in the afternoon.

Choosing Among the Ten

These ten sort less by some master ranking than by the retirement you have in mind. Galena, Montrose, North Adams, and Silver City keep a typical home near or under a quarter-million, while Ojai and the resort edge near Telluride run into seven figures. Homer and North Adams ask you to make peace with hard winters; Mount Dora, Ojai, and Florence hand you a mild one. Silver City and Mount Dora already draw enough retirees that you will have neighbors your age on the block. Match the town to the day you want to wake up to, and the list of ten shortens to about two.