Cost of Living Calculator
What you spend now, and how the new place differs
Your result will appear here
Fill in the fields on the left and this updates as you type.
Know what this estimate is based on
- Jurisdiction
- General mathematical model
- Scope and limitations
- Planning estimate only. Enter complete, current figures and keep an appropriate buffer for irregular or unexpected expenses.
- Source links checked
- Jul 30, 2026
Built and regression-tested by Smart Tools Lab. It has not been individually reviewed by a licensed financial, tax, or legal professional.
How to use
- 01
Fill the seven "now" fields with what you actually spend each month — rent or mortgage, utilities, groceries, eating out, getting around, healthcare, and everything else. Three months of statements beats memory; the last line is the one people underestimate.
- 02
Look up one percentage per category and enter it in the matching difference field. Rent is worth the most effort: price the size of home you would genuinely rent in the new place, not the metro-wide average.
- 03
Enter your household gross salary now, and the combined federal, state and payroll rate on your next dollar. That rate is the only place state income tax belongs on this page — it is money that never reaches you rather than money you spend.
- 04
Open Advanced options and add the one-time cost of the move if you have priced it, and correct any US-average benchmark that looks wrong for your household. Every benchmark here is an editable field carrying BLS 2024 data.
- 05
Read the headline against what you spend now, then the salary that leaves you the same money left over — and check the line-by-line table for the single category doing most of the work, because one bad rent figure can swing the whole answer.
Formula
For each of the seven categories: new monthly cost = what you spend now × (1 + the percentage difference ÷ 100). Add the seven up for the new monthly total; subtract your current total for the monthly change, and multiply by 12 for the annual change. The salary that keeps you level = your current salary + the annual change ÷ (1 − your marginal rate), because a raise arrives in gross pay and has to survive tax to cover an after-tax cost. First twelve months = the new monthly total × 12 + the one-time cost of the move. When the move saves money, the break-even point is the move cost ÷ the monthly saving.
Example
A household spending $1,800 on rent, $260 on utilities, $620 on groceries, $340 eating out, $640 getting around, $380 on healthcare and $900 on everything else — $4,940 a month, which is 86% of the $5,729 US average. The new city is 45% more on rent, 8% less on utilities, 6% more on groceries, 12% more eating out, 15% less to get around, 4% more on healthcare and 5% more on everything else. That comes to $5,771 a month: $831 more, or $9,977 a year, 16.8% up on today. Rent does almost all of it — $1,800 becomes $2,610, a swing of $810, so six of the seven categories together account for just $21. On a $96,000 salary with a 30% marginal rate, staying level takes $110,253 — a raise of $14,253 to deliver $9,977 after tax. Add a $4,200 move and the first twelve months there run $73,457, and ten years of the same gap is $99,768.
Definitions
- Consumer unit
- The BLS unit behind every average on this page: people sharing major expenses, averaging 2.4 people and 1.3 earners in 2024. It is not a family of four, and benchmarking a family of four against it will make you look like an overspender.
- Marginal rate
- The combined federal, state and payroll tax on your NEXT dollar of income, not your average rate. It is what decides how big a raise has to be to deliver a given amount of spendable money.
- Shelter
- The BLS category behind the rent benchmark — rent, mortgage interest, property taxes, maintenance and insurance on the home. At roughly a quarter of household spending it is the largest line and the one that varies most between metros.
- Break-even point
- For a move that saves money, the moment the accumulated saving has repaid the one-time cost of moving. Before it you are behind; the chart draws it as the point where the two cumulative lines cross.
Good to know
Why an index number cannot answer this question
The conventional cost-of-living calculator asks for two index values — your city is 112, the new one is 148 — and divides them. It has two problems, and the second is fatal. The first is that nobody has those numbers to hand; they come from a proprietary basket you cannot audit, built on a shopping list somebody else chose. The second is that an index applies fixed weights to a life you do not live. It weights housing at whatever share its basket says, but your answer depends on the share of YOUR budget, and those are wildly different numbers for different households. Take two people moving to the same expensive city. One rents and spends 38% of their money on it; the other paid off a mortgage twenty years ago and spends 8%. A city where rent runs 45% higher costs the first one a fortune and barely touches the second, and yet the index hands them the same multiplier and the same answer. The same failure runs through every line. A household with no car is unaffected by cheap fuel; a household with three children is dominated by childcare, which no index weights the way a family with three children experiences it. So this page inverts the whole thing: your own seven spending lines become the weights, and the only thing you look up is one percentage per category. It takes longer than typing two index numbers and it produces an answer that is actually about you.
Housing is where the difference lives
If you only have the patience to research one number on this page, make it the rent one. Shelter is roughly a quarter of what the average US household spends across these seven lines — $16,317 a year against a $68,748 total in the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey for 2024 — and it is the category with by far the widest spread between metros. Groceries and utilities vary between cities by tens of percent; rent varies by multiples. In the worked example on this page, a household moving somewhere 45% dearer on rent and modestly different on everything else sees $831 more a month, and $810 of that is rent alone. Six categories together account for $21. That concentration is the practical argument for spending your research budget in one place. It also tells you how to research it: price the home you would genuinely rent, at the size you actually need, in the neighbourhoods you would actually consider — not the metro-wide average, which is dragged around by whatever got built last year and by neighbourhoods you would never live in. And check the units of housing rather than only the dollars. A city where rent is 45% higher but where the same money buys a two-bedroom instead of a one-bedroom is a different proposition from one where it buys the same apartment at a higher price, and no percentage difference on its own can tell those two apart.
The salary question is not a proportion
Ask most calculators what salary keeps you level and they scale your income by the price ratio: earn $96,000 in a city that is 16.8% dearer and you need $112,128. That is wrong in both directions and it is wrong for the same reason the index is wrong — it assumes every dollar you earn is spent on the basket. It is not. Some of it is saved, some goes to taxes that do not scale with local prices, and some goes to costs that follow you unchanged. The correct question is narrower: how much more money has to land in your account to cover the change in your spending? That is the annual difference, and nothing else. But a raise does not arrive in your account, it arrives in gross pay, so it has to be big enough to survive tax on the way. If the same life costs $9,977 a year more and your next dollar is taxed at 30%, the raise has to be $14,253, because $9,977 divided by 0.70 is what produces $9,977 you can spend. That gross-up field is also where state income tax belongs, and it is the reason this page has no state picker. A state is a fifty-one-way categorical key that a numeric-only calculator cannot look up, and a ZIP or FIPS code is that same categorical key in a numeric costume. Nine states levy no broad income tax at all; moving between one of those and a high-tax state can be worth more than the entire rent difference, and folding it into one honest field beats a table this engine cannot express.
What this comparison deliberately cannot see
Four things sit outside the seven lines, and three of them can reverse the answer. The first is what the job pays there. A metro that costs 17% more and pays 25% more is a raise, not a cost, and no cost-of-living calculator knows local salaries for your role — that half of the decision has to come from job listings and from the offer itself. The second is the commute. A cheaper suburb reached by a 45-minute drive is not automatically cheaper: at an ordinary wage, an hour and a half a day of unpaid driving is worth several thousand dollars a year plus fuel and wear, which can swallow a rent saving whole. The third is the one-time cost of moving, which the page carries only as a single pass-through field: a cross-country move with professional movers routinely runs five figures once packing, storage, unpaid days off and the overlap month of double rent are counted, and on a move that saves money it is what decides whether you break even in eight months or four years. The fourth is quality, which no calculator can price at all. Sales tax, property tax and car registration all vary by state and are already inside the spending lines where you pay them; schools, weather, healthcare access and the distance to family are not on any line and are usually why people actually move. Treat the number this page produces as the financial floor of the decision, not the decision.
Frequently asked questions
Why does this page not ask for a cost-of-living index?
Because nobody has one to hand, and because an index is applied to somebody else's budget. An index weights housing at whatever share its basket says; your answer depends on the share of YOUR budget, which is completely different for a renter paying half their income in rent and a homeowner who finished paying twenty years ago. Both get the same index answer and two wildly different real ones. Entering your own seven lines takes five minutes and produces a number that is actually about you.
Why is there no state income tax field?
State income tax is a fifty-one-way categorical lookup, and this calculator's fields are numeric only — there is no honest numeric stand-in for a state, and a FIPS code or ZIP is a categorical key wearing a numeric costume. It is also conceptually in the wrong column: state tax is money that never reaches you, not money you spend. Fold it into the combined marginal-rate field instead. Nine states levy no broad income tax at all, and moving between one of those and a high-tax state can matter more than the entire rent difference.
What does "the salary that leaves you the same money left over" mean?
Not the salary that scales in proportion with prices — that is the classic index answer and it is wrong. This is your current salary plus exactly enough extra to cover the change in your spending, grossed up so that the after-tax amount lands. If the same life costs $9,977 a year more and your next dollar is taxed at 30%, you need $14,253 more gross, because $9,977 ÷ 0.70 is what produces $9,977 in the account.
The tax rate field is blank — what am I looking at?
The raise measured in take-home money. With the rate at zero the gross-up divisor is 1, so the salary figure assumes every extra dollar of pay arrives whole. That is a real reading rather than a broken one, but a raise is paid in gross, so enter the combined federal, state and payroll rate on your next dollar to see the number an offer letter would have to carry.
Are the US average figures a target?
No, they are a sanity check. They come from the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey for 2024 and they describe a consumer unit averaging 2.4 people with 1.3 earners — not a family of four. Retirement saving, which BLS counts as personal insurance and pensions, is deliberately excluded here because saving is not a cost of living, which is why the seven lines total $5,729 a month rather than the $6,545 the $78,535 headline implies.
How current are those benchmarks?
The 2024 data was published on 19 December 2025 and the fuller annual report in August 2026. The 2025 figures are scheduled for 29 October 2026, and BLS has pre-announced that they are impaired: the autumn 2025 lapse in appropriations cost them two months of diary records and a chunk of interview data, adjustment procedures were unfinished at publication, and standard errors will be higher. Every benchmark on this page is an editable field so you can correct it yourself rather than waiting.
Does this include the cost of the move itself?
Only through one pass-through field in Advanced options, which feeds the first-year figure and the chart. Pricing the move properly — the truck or the movers, packing, the overlap month of double rent, unpaid days off — is the moving cost calculator's job, and a cross-country move with professionals routinely runs five figures once those are counted.
What is the chart showing?
Ten years in each place, cumulative. The new city starts already carrying the one-time cost of the move, so when a move saves money you can see the year the two lines actually cross rather than being told it pays for itself. When the move costs money, the gap between the lines is what the decision costs over a decade.