The 25 US cities with the lowest cost of living

• It can be extremely expensive to live in big cities like New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles.
• However, living in other cities, like Indianapolis, South Bend, Indiana, and Toledo, Ohio, can be much more affordable.
• Here are the 25 US cities with the lowest cost of living.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Big coastal cities, such as New York and San Francisco, feature notoriously high rent prices and an expensive cost of living. But in their smaller Midwestern counterparts, like Indianapolis and Toledo, Ohio, things prove much, much cheaper.

Read more: San Francisco renters are dishing out $1,200 a month for bunk beds in co-living buildings to avoid the city's high rents - here's what they get for their money

And while a lower cost of living doesn't always equate to a higher quality of life, it can make a difference for those looking to stretch their paycheck.

Niche, a company that researches and compiles information on places to live, recently released its list of the US cities with the lowest cost of living. The ranking - which assessed more than 220 cities with populations of more than 100,000 - focused primarily on the ratio of home values to income, median property taxes, median home values, median rent, and ratios of monthly housing cost to income for each place. It also took the price of gas, the price of groceries, and the ratio of the median rent to income into consideration. Read a full breakdown of the methodology here.

The top 25 cities all fell within two regions: the Midwest and the South, with a city in Indiana earning the top spot. Check out the rest of the list below.

Emmie Martin contributed to a previous version of this article.