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.
Salary vs Cost of Living by Profession — USA Guide [2026]
Pick your profession to load a typical US salary for that role, then compare two cities. The point is that the highest-paying city for your job is rarely the one where you keep the most — and which one wins depends a lot on what you do.
- 🏙️ 78 US cities
- 🧾 2026 tax year
- ⚡ Instant result
- ✅ No signup
Why the national median is the wrong number
Every salary guide starts with a national median, and every national median hides the thing you actually want to know. A registered nurse's median of about $93,600 is a real figure. It is also close to meaningless on its own, because that salary produces a completely different life in Memphis than it does in San Francisco.
Pick your occupation in the tool above and it loads the national median for you. Then change the cities and watch what happens to the bottom line. The sections below walk through four occupations where the gap between headline pay and real outcome is especially wide.
Nurses: Best Cities for Real Take-Home Pay
Nursing is the clearest case in the whole dataset, because nursing salaries vary far less between cities than costs do. A hospital in San Francisco does pay more than one in Memphis — but rarely enough to cover rent that is more than twice as high. HUD's one-bedroom Fair Market Rent is $2,977 in San Francisco and $1,154 in Memphis.
Holding pay constant at the national median of $93,600 to isolate the cost-of-living effect:
| City | BEA price level | Annual net pay | Left each month |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Paso, TX | 89.9 | $74,678 | $4,101 |
| Corpus Christi, TX | 92.7 | $74,678 | $3,999 |
| Memphis, TN | 92.2 | $74,678 | $3,958 |
| San Antonio, TX | 94.7 | $74,678 | $3,938 |
| Knoxville, TN | 92.6 | $74,678 | $3,932 |
| Chattanooga, TN | 91.5 | $74,678 | $3,851 |
| San Diego, CA | 111.9 | $70,362 | $2,052 |
| New York City, NY | 112.6 | $67,002 | $1,609 |
| San Jose, CA | 110.4 | $70,362 | $1,572 |
| San Francisco, CA | 115.6 | $70,362 | $1,512 |
The same salary leaves a nurse with about 2.7 times as much each month in El Paso as in San Francisco. Coastal hospitals do pay above the median, and in California noticeably so — but the question is always whether the premium exceeds the cost gap, and across most of the country it does not come close.
If you are a travel nurse, this matters more than for anyone else, because you choose the assignment. The right move is to compare the offered rate against local rent and prices before accepting, and to remember that a tax-free stipend for housing and meals changes the math substantially — enter only your taxable base rate above, then add the stipend back to the disposable figure by hand.
Teachers: Which States Pay Enough to Live?
Teaching produces the most uncomfortable numbers on this page. On the national median of about $64,390, a single teacher's essential costs exceed their take-home pay in San Francisco. In San Jose the margin is $48 a month, and in New York City $107.
| City | BEA price level | Left each month |
|---|---|---|
| El Paso, TX | 89.9 | $2,371 |
| Corpus Christi, TX | 92.7 | $2,269 |
| Memphis, TN | 92.2 | $2,228 |
| Tulsa, OK | 89.2 | $2,216 |
| San Antonio, TX | 94.7 | $2,207 |
| Seattle, WA | 111.1 | $1,118 |
| Washington, DC | 108.9 | $1,009 |
| Los Angeles, CA | 113.6 | $920 |
| Boston, MA | 108.3 | $497 |
| New York City, NY | 112.6 | $107 |
| San Jose, CA | 110.4 | $48 |
| San Francisco, CA | 115.6 | −$12 |
Districts in high-cost metros do pay above the national median, and several of the systems on that list pay well above it — which is exactly the right thing to check. Look up your district's published salary schedule, find the step and lane you would actually be placed on, and run that number rather than the median. The schedules are public documents and the difference is often $20,000 or more.
What the table is really showing is that the national median is not a livable salary in a high-cost city, so if a district is not paying substantially above it, the arithmetic does not work no matter how much you want the job.
Software Engineers: SF vs Austin vs Seattle
Engineers are the one group where holding salary constant would be misleading, because pay genuinely does scale with the market. So this comparison uses locally realistic figures for a mid-to-senior engineer rather than one national number.
| City | Base salary | BEA price level | Annual net pay | Left each month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seattle, WA | $185,000 | 111.1 | $137,745 | $8,103 |
| San Jose, CA | $210,000 | 110.4 | $141,151 | $7,471 |
| San Francisco, CA | $205,000 | 115.6 | $137,934 | $7,143 |
| Austin, TX | $155,000 | 98.1 | $117,209 | $7,097 |
| Denver, CO | $150,000 | 105.8 | $107,830 | $6,054 |
| Raleigh, NC | $140,000 | 98.2 | $101,879 | $5,749 |
| Atlanta, GA | $142,000 | 100.1 | $101,986 | $5,662 |
Two things worth sitting with. First, Seattle comes out ahead of both Bay Area cities, on lower pay, because Washington charges no state income tax and Seattle's rent is lower: a one-bedroom Fair Market Rent of $2,146 against $2,977 in San Francisco. Second, Austin at $155,000 lands within $46 a month of San Francisco at $205,000 — a $50,000 salary difference that almost entirely evaporates.
This is base salary only, and for engineers that is a real limitation. Equity is often the larger part of a senior offer at a large public company, and it does not scale with local costs at all — a share of stock is worth the same in Austin as in Menlo Park. If your offer is equity-heavy, the Bay Area case gets considerably stronger, and you should value the equity separately rather than trying to fold it into a cost-of-living comparison.
Healthcare Workers: Best States for COL Ratio
Beyond nursing, healthcare covers a wide pay range, and the cost-of-living effect hits each band differently.
Higher-paid roles — pharmacists at a national median near $137,480, physical therapists near $101,020 — have enough headroom that the city choice changes comfort rather than viability. These salaries work almost everywhere; they just work much better in a low-cost state.
Mid-band roles — dental hygienists near $94,260, registered nurses near $93,600 — are where the decision actually bites. These land comfortably in Tennessee, Texas and the Midwest, and become tight in coastal metros.
Support and technician roles are where the high-cost metros stop working at all. If the pay is near or below the national median and the city's one-bedroom Fair Market Rent is above about $2,400, the numbers get very tight without a second income or shared housing.
The states that consistently produce the best ratio for healthcare workers are the ones that pair hospital employment with low costs and no income tax: Tennessee (BEA price levels: Memphis 92.2, Knoxville 92.6, Chattanooga 91.5, Nashville 96.3), Texas (El Paso 89.9, Corpus Christi 92.7, San Antonio 94.7, Houston 98.6) and Florida outside the southeast coast (Jacksonville 99.5, Tampa 100.9, Orlando 101.4).
A shift differential or an overtime pattern can be worth more than a city move. Before relocating, work out what your current role pays at your realistic hours, run it through the calculator, and then compare. Moving is expensive and irreversible in a way that picking up two night shifts a month is not.
How to use this for your own role
The occupation list above covers twenty common jobs with their national medians, but your salary is your salary. Three steps give you a reliable answer:
- Load your occupation to get a starting figure, then overwrite it with what you actually earn or have been offered. The median is a reference point, not a target.
- Run your current city against the city you are considering. The headline figure is the salary you would need there to live as you live now. If the offer is below it, you have a number to negotiate against.
- Check your household. Children change the answer more than almost anything else, and the family cost of living calculator prices childcare by each child's age rather than guessing.
If you end up with a gap to close, the negotiation letter generator turns the number into a draft you can send.
Who This Profession Salary Guide Is For
This guide to salary vs cost of living by profession is for nurses, teachers, engineers and other workers whose pay is set locally and varies sharply between states. It is useful when you are choosing where to take your licence, comparing a travel contract with a staff role, or checking whether your pay keeps up with your city.
The salary comparison by job and city starts from a typical wage for your role and runs it through each city's taxes and living costs. Your own offer will differ, so replace the default salary with your real number before comparing.
Go deeper
For a nurse salary vs cost of living by state ranking, read the best states for nurses salary in 2026. Travel nurses should also see travel nurse salary vs cost of living by city, which separates taxable pay from stipends.
Wages come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, which publishes pay by occupation for every state and metro, and price levels from the Regional Price Parities from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
California posts the highest headline RN salaries in the country, but it also contains our most expensive mainland metros — San Francisco at 115.6 and San Jose at 110.4 on BEA's price level, with the highest rents we track. Nurses often keep more in Texas and Tennessee, where pay is lower but there is no state income tax and price levels sit in the low 90s. Load the nurse preset and compare a California city against San Antonio or Memphis to see the effect.
Because teacher pay is set by district budgets that do not track local housing costs. On the median teacher salary, a single teacher has about $1,947 a month left in Columbus, $1,379 in Denver and $1,118 in Seattle, yet the role is the same. Comparing the equivalent salary between two districts shows how large the real gap is once housing and state tax are accounted for.
San Francisco pays the most and costs the most, with a BEA price level of 115.6 and the highest rents we track. Seattle sits at 111.1 with no state income tax, which closes more of the gap than people expect. Austin is 98.1 with no state income tax either, so a lower headline offer there often survives the comparison. Run your two actual offers through the job offer tool rather than trusting the general reputation of each city.
The presets are typical national full-time salaries for each occupation, rounded, and used as a starting point so you do not have to look one up. They are not a quote for any specific employer or city, and experience, specializm and shift differentials move them a long way. Replace the number with your own offer or current salary for a result that means something.
Partly. Enter your annualised rate and it will handle tax and living costs correctly, but contract work has features this model does not cover — untaxed stipends, short assignments where you are not paying full-year housing, and self-employment tax if you are 1099 rather than W-2. Treat the output as a baseline and adjust for those.
Convert your current salary into the equivalent for the city you are moving to, then make that number your anchor. It reframes the conversation from what you earned before to what the role costs to live on, which is a much easier case for a manager to take to their budget holder. The negotiation letter generator will put that argument into a sendable draft.
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.