Newport Beach in Orange County has quietly become one of California’s most expensive property markets, with three of the state’s 10 priciest ZIP codes by median home value in 2026, according to a new analysis of housing data by the Los Angeles Times. The shift, driven in large part by affluent buyers leaving Los Angeles, has pushed Newport Beach into the top tier of US real estate, with some neighbourhoods now averaging multi‑million‑pound price tags.
For context, California’s ultra‑rich postcodes used to sit almost entirely around Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Back in 2001, seven of the 10 ZIP codes with the state’s highest home prices were in Northern California. By 2026, reporter Terry Castleman found that balance had flipped. Seven of the top 10 are now in Southern California, three of them clustered in Newport Beach. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica have muscled onto the list as well, displacing long‑established northern enclaves such as Portola Valley, Ross, Palo Alto and Tiburon.
On the national leaderboard, California still dominates. Six of America’s 10 most expensive ZIP codes are in the state, with Atherton in San Mateo County holding its crown at the very top. Its median home value stands at $7.7 million, ahead of Miami Beach, the Hamptons outpost of Sagaponack in New York, Woody Creek in Colorado and, just behind them, the hottest pockets of Newport Beach.
How Los Angeles Sellers Turned Newport Beach Into A Fortress Market
The news came after years of gradual but decisive migration out of Los Angeles by wealthy homeowners, a trend that accelerated during the COVID‑19 pandemic and in the wake of repeated wildfire seasons. The Timesanalysis links Newport Beach’s surge to two intertwined forces: the appreciation of existing coastal property and a wave of so‑called ‘fleeing Angelenos’.
Some moved south to escape Los Angeles County’s stricter pandemic rules, including masking policies and prolonged school closures. Others were unnerved by the flames that threatened or scorched affluent hillside neighbourhoods such as Pacific Palisades. What might once have felt like a distant Orange County beach town suddenly looked like a safer, more predictable bet.
‘We look like a deal compared to L.A. real estate,’ said Newport Beach estate agent Annie Clougherty, speaking to the Times. In her view, Newport used to fight mainly for buyers already based in Orange County. Now, she said, Los Angeles money has decisively entered the bidding, helping to lift prices across the city.
Clougherty also pointed to a factor that rarely shows up in property spreadsheets. Many of her Los Angeles clients, she said, preferred Newport Beach’s more conservative politics. For buyers unsettled by the city’s progressive tilt, crime debates or public‑health regulations, the idea of a solidly centre‑right coastal enclave with impeccable schools and yacht clubs was part of the appeal. It is an ideological migration as much as a geographical one.
The numbers bear out just how exclusive that choice has become. In the Newport Coast area, under the 92657 ZIP code, the median home value was $5.42 million as of 31 January, based on Zillow data reviewed by the Times. Nearby, 92661 and 92662, covering the Balboa Peninsula and Balboa Island, both sat close to $4.25 million.
Set against those figures, California’s overall median home value of roughly $750,000 looks almost modest. In Newport Beach, the average home across the city was worth about $3.5 million and the average monthly rent hovered around $9,000. For a sizeable swathe of Los Angeles exiles, those numbers are manageable. For most Californians, they may as well be theoretical.
Los Angeles Exodus Has A Human Cost In Newport Beach
It can be recalled that Southern California’s coastal boom has rarely been an unqualified triumph for locals on ordinary incomes. The same dynamics that make Newport Beach a safe harbour for disenchanted Los Angeles elites are squeezing long‑time residents, service workers and younger families to the margins.
A poll conducted by UC Irvine in Orange County last year, cited in the Times newsletter, found that housing costs had become a top worry for residents. Around one third of respondents said they would consider moving away because of the affordability crisis. Those statistics are not abstract. They translate into teachers commuting from cheaper inland cities, hospitality workers sharing cramped flats far from the sand, and adult children who have no realistic path to owning in the place they grew up.
Newport Beach is hardly alone in that tension, but it now stands as a particularly stark example of what happens when Los Angeles wealth goes house‑hunting. A single destination ends up with some of the highest‑valued homes in California and some of the most brutal entry barriers for anyone outside the global one per cent.
Officials have not yet laid out a comprehensive plan in response to this latest surge, and nothing in the Timesreporting suggests an imminent policy fix for Newport Beach. For now, the market is doing what it does when cash from Los Angeles and beyond floods into a finite strip of coastline: it climbs, parcel by parcel, until those ferries shuttling past Balboa Island are skimming along one of the most expensive shorelines in the United States.
Nothing is confirmed yet about whether this Newport Beach boom has reached its ceiling or if even higher prices lie ahead, so all projections should be taken with a grain of salt.
