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.
Job Offer Comparison Calculator — See Which Pays More [2026]
Put two offers side by side with their own salary and their own city. The calculator runs both through 2026 tax rules and local living costs, then tells you which one actually leaves you better off — and by how much per month.
- 🏙️ 78 US cities
- 🧾 2026 tax year
- ⚡ Instant result
- ✅ No signup
How to Compare Two Job Offers
Most people compare offers by putting the two salaries next to each other and picking the bigger one. That works fine when both jobs are in the same city. The moment they are not, the bigger number stops being the better offer, and it stops being reliable in a way that costs real money.
The question worth answering is not "which pays more" but "which leaves me more." Those are different questions, and they frequently have different answers.
To get there you need four things, which is exactly what the tool above asks for: each offer's salary, and each offer's city. It then runs both through 2026 federal, state, city and payroll tax, applies the local cost of housing, food, transport, healthcare and utilities, and reports what is left at the end of the month under each one.
The headline it gives you is the break-even salary — what Offer B would have to pay to match Offer A once everything is accounted for. If Offer B is above that, it genuinely wins. If it is below, you now know by exactly how much, which is the number to take back to the recruiter.
Do this before you reply to either company
- Enter both offers with their real base salaries. Not the "total compensation" figure from the recruiter's email — just base. Equity and bonus come later and need different treatment.
- Set your household size and filing status. A married filer with two children gets a very different answer than a single filer, and the gap widens in high-childcare metros.
- Open Fine-tune and switch off anything that does not apply. If one employer covers health insurance in full and the other does not, that difference is worth thousands and the toggle is how you show it.
- Write down the break-even number. That is your anchor for the negotiation, and it is defensible in a way that "I was hoping for more" is not.
What Counts as Real Compensation?
Base salary is the part that cost of living acts on directly, which is why this calculator works on it. But it is not the whole offer, and the pieces it leaves out are worth assessing deliberately rather than ignoring.
Equity. Treat unvested equity as a probability, not an amount. Public company RSUs on a standard four-year vest with a one-year cliff are reasonably solid, though the share price is not. Private company options are a lottery ticket with a strike price — plenty of people have held options that were worth nothing on paper and nothing in reality. A common approach is to discount private equity heavily, somewhere around 50 to 70 percent, and then see whether the offer still stands up.
Bonus. Ask whether it is contractual or discretionary, what the target percentage is, and what it has actually paid out for the last two years. "Up to 20%" and "20% every year for three years" are not the same offer.
Health insurance. This is the most commonly underweighted item. The difference between a plan where the employer covers the family premium and one where you pay $600 a month toward it is $7,200 a year of after-tax money. That is worth more than a $9,000 raise.
Retirement match. A 6% match that vests immediately is 6% of salary. A 3% match on a four-year vesting cliff is worth much less if you are the kind of person who moves every two or three years.
Paid time off. Five extra days is roughly 2% of your salary in value. Not decisive on its own, but worth counting when two offers are close.
Work the cash comparison first using the calculator above, then adjust the result by hand for the items on this list. Trying to hold all of it in your head at once is how people end up choosing on gut feel and regretting it in month four.
Job Offer in NYC vs Austin: Example
Here is the case that shows why the headline salary misleads. You have $150,000 on the table in New York City and $120,000 in Austin. On paper that is a $30,000 difference, and most people would not even run the numbers.
| Line | NYC offer | Austin offer | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base salary | $150,000/yr | $120,000/yr | −$30,000 |
| Total tax | $49,879/yr | $26,750/yr | −$23,129 |
| Net take-home | $100,121/yr | $93,250/yr | −$6,871 |
| Living costs | $3,975 | $2,670 | −$1,305 |
| Left each month | $4,369 | $5,100 | +$731 |
Austin wins by about $8,800 a year despite paying $30,000 less. Two things drive it. New York charges state income tax and then a city income tax on top, while Texas charges neither, so $23,129 of the $30,000 gap disappears in tax alone. Then higher costs — mostly rent, with a HUD one-bedroom Fair Market Rent of $2,655 in New York against $1,562 in Austin — take another $1,305 a month out of the New York offer before you have bought anything discretionary.
None of which means Austin is the right choice. New York might be worth $8,800 a year to you, and for plenty of people it is. The point is to make that trade knowingly instead of discovering it in March.
When the expensive city does win
It happens, and it is usually one of three reasons. The salary gap is genuinely enormous rather than merely large — a doubling, not a 25% bump. The role only exists in that market, so taking it buys you a career step you cannot get elsewhere. Or the equity is real and liquid, which changes the math entirely.
What does not justify it is the assumption that a higher number must mean more money. Across the 78 cities in our data, BEA price levels run from 89.2 to 115.6, but rent varies far more: HUD one-bedroom Fair Market Rents run from $987 to $2,982 a month. A 25% raise does not cover rent that doubles, and no amount of enthusiasm makes it.
Questions to Ask Before Accepting
Before you sign anything, get written answers to these. Recruiters expect the questions and will not think less of you for asking — the ones who do are telling you something useful.
- Is the base salary in the written offer, and is it the number you quoted me? Verbal figures drift.
- Is the relocation package grossed up for tax? A $20,000 relocation payment that is not grossed up is worth roughly $13,000 after it is taxed as income.
- Who pays for the house hunting trip, the movers, the temporary housing, and the realtor fees? These add up fast and are the most commonly disputed items.
- When is the first paycheck, and is it a full one? Moving costs land immediately. Pay often does not.
- What does the health plan actually cost me per month for my household, and what is the deductible? Ask for the summary of benefits, not a summary of the summary.
- What is the retirement match and what is the vesting schedule?
- Is the bonus contractual or discretionary, and what has it paid out the last two years?
- If this is equity, what is the strike price, the current 409A valuation, the vesting schedule, and the exercise window if I leave? A 90-day exercise window on options you cannot afford to exercise is not compensation.
- If I am required to relocate again within two years, who covers it?
- Is there a clawback on the signing or relocation bonus, and for how long? Twelve months is normal. Twenty-four is worth negotiating.
Once you have those answers, run the comparison again with the corrected numbers. If the offer you preferred still wins, take it with confidence. If it does not, you have just saved yourself a year of quiet resentment — and you have the figures to go back and ask for the gap.
Who This Job Offer Comparison Calculator Is For
This job offer comparison calculator is built for the moment you have two written numbers in two different places and a deadline. It is just as useful before you apply, to see what an out-of-town role would need to pay to be worth the move, and when you are weighing a counter-offer from your current employer against an offer elsewhere.
It compares cash: salary after 2026 federal, state and local tax, minus the living costs of each city. Equity, bonus targets, retirement matching and health plans sit outside that comparison, which is why the checklist above exists. Run the cash comparison first and adjust by hand afterwards.
Go deeper before you decide
Our step-by-step guide on how to compare two job offers in different cities walks through the same method with worked examples, and should I relocate for a job covers the ten non-salary checks that most often change the answer. If the cheaper offer is the one you prefer, the salary negotiation letter generator turns the gap into a written request.
The cost side of the comparison is anchored to the Regional Price Parities from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the tax side follows the IRS federal income tax brackets for 2026 along with each state's own rates. Both are public, so you can check any figure the calculator uses.
Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
Compare what is left after tax and living costs, not the headline salaries. Enter each offer with its own salary and its own city. The calculator deducts federal, state, city and payroll taxes from each, applies that city's cost of living to your household, and shows the monthly money left over under each offer. The bigger number wins, and it is often not the bigger salary.
Sometimes, but less often than people assume. Rent is the big swing: a one-bedroom Fair Market Rent in San Francisco is about double Houston's. For a single person, a 25% raise from $80,000 in Houston to $100,000 in San Francisco leaves about $1,840 a month after tax and living costs, against about $2,930 in Houston, so you end up worse off. The same raise to Dallas leaves about $3,755, a real gain. Run both offers before you decide.
Count it, but keep it separate from salary. A relocation package is one-time money, while a cost of living difference repeats every month for as long as you stay. Add the bonus into the comparison to see how many months it takes to cover the gap — if an offer is $900 a month worse and the bonus is $9,000, it buys you ten months and nothing after that.
This tool compares cash compensation, because that is the part cost of living acts on. Equity and annual bonus should be assessed separately, and you should discount unvested equity for risk. Health insurance matters too: if one employer covers your premiums and the other does not, turn the Healthcare switch off for the covered offer so the comparison is fair.
No. Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Nevada, Washington and Alaska charge no state income tax, which is a genuine advantage — but Seattle and Miami are among the priciest metros in our data, with one-bedroom Fair Market Rents of $2,146 and $1,995 a month. A few thousand dollars of tax saved can disappear in rent. The calculator nets both effects so you can see which one dominates.
Confirm the base salary in writing, whether the relocation package is grossed up for tax, who pays the realtor and moving costs, when the first paycheck lands, what the health plan actually costs you per month, and whether the role is tied to the office or portable. Each of those changes the real value of the offer, and all of them are easier to ask before you sign.
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.