Know what your San Francisco home is really worth

San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the fourth-most populous city in California and the 17th-most populous in the United States, with a population of 826,079 in 2025. Among U.S. cities with a population of 200,000 or more, San Francisco is ranked first by per capita income, second by population density, and sixth by aggregate income as of 2024. Some 4.6 million residents live in the city's metropolitan statistical area, which is the 13th-largest in the United States. Around 9.2 million live in the San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland combined statistical area, the fifth-largest in the United States.

Prior to European settlement, San Francisco was inhabited by the Yelamu Ohlone. On June 29, 1776, settlers from New Spain established the Presidio of San Francisco at the Golden Gate, and the Mission San Francisco de Asís a few miles away, both named for Francis of Assisi. The California gold rush of 1849 brought rapid growth, making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time. In 1856, San Francisco became a consolidated city-county. After three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, it was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama–Pacific International Exposition nine years later. In World War II, it was a major port of embarkation for naval service members shipping out to the Pacific theater. After the war, the confluence of returning servicemen, significant immigration, liberalizing attitudes, the rise of the beatnik and hippie countercultures, the sexual revolution, opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and other factors led to the Summer of Love and the gay rights movement, cementing San Francisco as a center of liberal activism.

The San Francisco Bay Area is among the most economically productive large urban areas in the United States and the world, with a GDP of $1.332 trillion in 2024, higher than all but 17 countries. As of 2020, the OECD-defined metropolitan area, with 6.7 million residents, ranked 5th by GDP ($874 billion) and 2nd by GDP per capita ($131,082) across all metropolitan areas in the OECD countries. In 2024, San Francisco proper had a GDP of $268 billion and a GDP per capita of $324,000. This productivity is spurred by its leading universities, high-tech, healthcare, finance, insurance, real estate, and professional services sectors. The city is home to numerous companies—many in the technology sector—including Salesforce, Uber, Airbnb, Levi's, Gap, OpenAI, Chime, Anthropic, Databricks, Dropbox, and Lyft.