Salary vs Cost of Living Calculator
Compare your real purchasing power in any two US cities. See exactly what salary you need to keep the same lifestyle after taxes and living costs.
Disposable Income Calculator by City — What You REALLY Keep
One salary, one city, and an honest answer. This works out what actually lands in your account each month after federal, state and city tax, then subtracts rent, groceries, transport, healthcare and utilities to show the money you genuinely have left.
- 🏙️ 78 US cities
- 🧾 2026 tax year
- ⚡ Instant result
- ✅ No signup
How to Calculate True Take-Home Pay
There are three numbers in your financial life and most people only know the first one.
Gross salary is what the offer letter says. It is the number you tell people at parties and the number that appears in job listings. You never see a cent of it.
Net pay is what lands in your account. Gross minus federal income tax, minus Social Security and Medicare, minus state income tax, minus city income tax where it applies. For most people this is somewhere between 68% and 80% of gross, and the spread across states is wider than that range suggests.
Disposable income is net pay minus the cost of existing — rent or mortgage, groceries, getting to work, health insurance, utilities, and childcare if you have young children. This is the only one of the three that tells you anything about your actual life. It is the number that decides whether you can save, whether a car repair is an inconvenience or a crisis, and whether you can afford to live where you want to live.
The calculator above does all three in one pass. Enter your salary and your city, set your household, and it shows you where every dollar between gross and disposable goes.
Doing it by hand
If you want to sanity-check the result, the order of operations is:
- Start with gross annual salary.
- Subtract 7.65% for payroll tax — 6.2% Social Security up to the $184,500 wage base for 2026, plus 1.45% Medicare on everything.
- Subtract federal income tax, calculated on gross minus the standard deduction, applied through the brackets rather than as one flat rate.
- Subtract state income tax using your state's actual brackets. Six states in our data charge nothing on wages.
- Subtract city income tax if you live in one of the sixteen covered cities that levy one.
- Divide by twelve. That is your monthly net.
- Subtract your real monthly costs: housing, food, transport, healthcare premiums and out-of-pocket, utilities, childcare.
What is left is disposable income. If that number surprised you, you are in the majority.
Why Gross Salary Is Misleading
Gross salary is a useful comparison between two jobs in the same city. Outside of that, it is close to meaningless, for two reasons that compound.
Taxes are not uniform. A single filer on $100,000 keeps $79,180 in Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Nevada, Washington or Alaska. The same salary in New York City keeps $70,879, because New York State takes a cut and then New York City takes another one. That is $8,301 a year of difference before anyone has paid rent — like a raise of nearly $12,000 in a no-tax state.
Costs are not uniform either, and rent is where the spread is enormous. BEA price levels in our cities run from 89.2 in Tulsa to 115.6 in San Francisco and Oakland, about 30% apart. Rent swings far more: HUD's one-bedroom Fair Market Rent runs from $987 a month in Tulsa to $2,982 in San Jose, three times as much.
Stack those two effects and the result is a gap that no amount of salary negotiation closes. On $100,000, a single filer has about $4,476 a month left over in El Paso and about $1,837 in San Francisco. Same job, same pay, same person — more than twice the money at the end of the month.
This is why "is $100k a good salary" has no answer. It is an excellent salary in Memphis, a comfortable one in Charlotte, a tight one in Boston, and a genuinely difficult one in San Francisco, San Jose or New York City. The city is not a footnote to the number. It is half the number.
Cities With Highest Disposable Income
Here is what $100,000 leaves you each month across the strongest and weakest cities in our data. The pattern is not subtle: low rent plus no state income tax wins most of the time. Seven of the top ten are in states with no income tax on wages.
| City | BEA price level | Annual net pay | Monthly costs | Left each month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| El Paso, TX | 89.9 | $79,180 | $2,122 | $4,476 |
| Corpus Christi, TX | 92.7 | $79,180 | $2,224 | $4,374 |
| Memphis, TN | 92.2 | $79,180 | $2,265 | $4,333 |
| San Antonio, TX | 94.7 | $79,180 | $2,286 | $4,313 |
| Knoxville, TN | 92.6 | $79,180 | $2,291 | $4,307 |
| Chattanooga, TN | 91.5 | $79,180 | $2,373 | $4,226 |
| Spokane, WA | 100.3 | $79,180 | $2,404 | $4,195 |
| Tulsa, OK | 89.2 | $75,226 | $2,081 | $4,187 |
| Tucson, AZ | 96.9 | $76,889 | $2,229 | $4,179 |
| New Orleans, LA | 92.6 | $76,566 | $2,203 | $4,177 |
Notice that Tulsa has the lowest price level in our data — 89.2 — and still ends up just behind Spokane at 100.3. Oklahoma charges state income tax and Washington does not, and that $3,955 a year in tax outweighs Tulsa's lower rent and prices. The two forces do not always point the same way.
And at the other end
| City | BEA price level | Annual net pay | Monthly costs | Left each month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| San Francisco, CA | 115.6 | $74,269 | $4,352 | $1,837 |
| San Jose, CA | 110.4 | $74,269 | $4,292 | $1,898 |
| New York City, NY | 112.6 | $70,879 | $3,975 | $1,932 |
| San Diego, CA | 111.9 | $74,269 | $3,811 | $2,378 |
| Oakland, CA | 115.6 | $74,269 | $3,760 | $2,429 |
| Boston, MA | 108.3 | $74,400 | $3,746 | $2,454 |
New York City is the clearest illustration of how the two effects stack. It does not have the highest prices in our data — San Francisco and Oakland do — but it has the heaviest tax burden of any city here at $29,121 on a $100,000 salary, because of that second layer of city income tax. High cost and high tax together produce the third-worst outcome in our data, behind only San Francisco and San Jose, where rent is higher still.
How Taxes Affect Your Take-Home Pay
Three separate systems take money out of your paycheck, and they behave differently.
Federal income tax
Progressive, applied in brackets. Only the portion of income inside each bracket is taxed at that bracket's rate, which is why "moving into a higher tax bracket" never reduces your total take-home pay. On $100,000 for a single filer in 2026, after the standard deduction, the effective federal rate works out well below the top marginal rate people quote.
Payroll tax
Flat and unavoidable. Social Security at 6.2% on everything up to $184,500, Medicare at 1.45% with no ceiling, and an extra 0.9% Medicare surtax above $200,000 for a single filer. Because Social Security stops at the wage base, high earners see their effective payroll rate fall as income rises — the one regressive piece of the federal system.
State and local income tax
This is where geography does the most damage, or the most good. Of the 39 states in our data, six charge nothing on wages: Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Nevada, Washington and Alaska. At the other end, California's brackets reach into double digits and New York State is followed by a separate New York City income tax.
Sixteen cities in our dataset levy their own income or wage tax on top of the state's: New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Detroit, Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Kansas City, St. Louis, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Louisville, Birmingham, Denver and Portland. If you are comparing a suburb to a city center within the same metro, this can be the deciding factor.
No income tax does not mean no tax. States without an income tax raise revenue elsewhere — property tax, sales tax, and in Texas's case notably high property tax rates. If you are buying rather than renting, check the local property tax rate before you treat the income tax saving as pure profit.
Once you know your disposable figure, the salary vs cost of living calculator will show you what it would take to hold that same number somewhere else — which is the number to negotiate on if you are planning a move.
Who This Disposable Income Calculator Is For
This disposable income calculator by city is for people who want one honest monthly number: what is left after tax and after the costs you cannot avoid. It is useful when you set a budget, when you decide whether a raise is worth chasing, and when you compare your take home pay by city before a move.
It deliberately stops at essentials. Debt payments, savings goals and spending choices are yours to subtract, which keeps the result comparable from one city to the next and easy to sanity-check against your own bank statements.
Go deeper
For the full walk from gross to net, read gross salary vs take home pay, and for a state-by-state table of one common salary, see how much $80,000 is after tax in every US state. If two cities are on your list, the salary vs cost of living calculator puts them side by side.
Federal tax follows the IRS federal income tax brackets for 2026. Spending patterns behind the living-cost lines are informed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Surveys, which track how US households actually split their spending.
Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
Here it means the money left each month after income tax, payroll tax and your essential living costs — housing, food, transport, healthcare and utilities. It is the number that decides whether you can save, not your salary. Two people on identical salaries in Cleveland and Boston end up with very different amounts of it.
Because none of it survives contact with reality. A $100,000 salary loses federal income tax, 6.2% Social Security up to the $184,500 wage base, 1.45% Medicare, and then state and often city income tax. What remains meets a housing cost that can differ by a factor of three between cities. The headline number tells you almost nothing on its own.
It depends heavily on the state. A single filer on $100,000 in Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Nevada, Washington or Alaska pays no state income tax at all. The same salary in California runs through brackets reaching 9.3% at that level, and in New York City you pay state tax plus a city income tax on top. Enter your own city to see the specific figure rather than relying on an average.
The pattern that keeps winning is low rent plus no state income tax. In our data that points at Texas and Tennessee — El Paso (89.9), Corpus Christi (92.7), Memphis (92.2), San Antonio (94.7), Knoxville (92.6) and Chattanooga (91.5). Tulsa and Oklahoma City are as cheap but do levy state tax. The worst outcomes come from the opposite pairing: high rent and high state or city tax, as in San Francisco, San Jose and New York City.
No, and that is deliberate. Those are personal commitments rather than the cost of living in a place, and including them would make city-to-city comparison meaningless. Subtract your own loan payments and savings target from the disposable figure to get your true spending money.
Start with the disposable number, then take out debt payments and the amount you intend to save before you plan any discretionary spending. If the result is uncomfortably thin, the breakdown shows you which category is doing the damage — in high-cost cities it is almost always housing, which is why switching the lifestyle level or the housing basis moves the total so much.
Transparency
How We Calculate These Numbers
No black box — here is exactly what happens to your salary
1. Federal tax
Your gross pay runs through the 2026 federal income tax brackets for your filing status, after the standard deduction. We use the bracket structure rather than an effective-rate shortcut, because the shortcut quietly overstates tax on lower incomes and understates it on higher ones.
2. Payroll tax
Social Security at 6.2% up to the 2026 wage base of $184,500, then Medicare at 1.45% on everything, plus the 0.9% Additional Medicare surtax above $200,000 for a single filer. These come out before anything else, which is why take-home never scales linearly with a raise.
3. State and local tax
Each state is modeled with its own bracket structure — flat where the state is flat, graduated where it is graduated. Sixteen cities also levy their own income or wage tax, including New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Denver and Portland. Six states in our data charge no income tax on wages at all: Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Nevada, Washington and Alaska.
4. Cost of living
Rent is the HUD FY2026 Fair Market Rent for each city. Other costs are scaled by the BEA's 2024 Regional Price Parities for that metro (100 = US average), using BEA's separate goods, utilities and services indexes. Across 78 cities, overall prices run from 89.2 in Tulsa to 115.6 in San Francisco, and rent varies far more than that. See the full methodology.
5. Your household
Costs scale with the number of adults and children you tell us about. Childcare is priced by each child's age — roughly $1,400 a month under two, $1,100 from two to five, $550 for school age, and nothing from thirteen — because a flat per-child figure is wrong for almost everybody.
6. What is left
Take-home pay minus modeled expenses is your disposable income. The equivalent salary is simply the gross figure that leaves you the same amount left over in the other city. That is the number worth negotiating on.
Where this is strong, and where it is not
The tax side is the reliable half. Brackets, thresholds and wage bases are published rules, and we apply them directly. If your W-2 situation is straightforward, the take-home figure should land close.
The cost side is a model, not a quote. It describes a typical household at the size and lifestyle level you select, using a comparative regional price index. It does not know that you have a rent-controlled apartment, a paid-off car, an unusually brutal commute, or an employer covering your health premiums in full. Those are real and they can move the answer by thousands. The Fine-tune panel exists so you can switch individual expense categories off and rebuild the estimate around what is actually true for you.
We also do not model equity vesting schedules, bonuses, 401(k) matching, itemized deductions or credits such as the Child Tax Credit. Those are worth factoring in separately before you sign anything.
Tax data reflects the 2026 tax year. Cost indices last reviewed October 2026. These tools are published for general information and are not financial, tax or legal advice.