Click any city on the map. Pick another. See what your salary needs to be in the new city to keep the same lifestyle — with the math in front of you.
Each city's cost-of-living index is a composite measure of housing, groceries, transportation, utilities, healthcare, and miscellaneous expenses, scaled so that the U.S. national average equals 100. A city with an index of 130 means everyday life there costs about 30% more than the national average; a city at 85 costs about 15% less.
The math is straightforward — to keep the same lifestyle, your income should scale with the cost-of-living ratio between the two cities:
So a $100,000 salary in San Francisco (index ~180) is equivalent to about $50,000 in Cleveland (index ~88), because Cleveland is roughly half the cost of San Francisco. Same lifestyle, very different number.
About the data: the indices used here are approximations drawn from publicly available sources, including U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics metro-area consumer price data, BestPlaces-style cost-of-living aggregations, and Numbeo's crowdsourced indices. They are rounded for clarity and current to recent years, not to a single specific date.
A composite single-number index is also a blunt instrument. Housing is the dominant driver in most expensive cities — if you rent in San Francisco the gap feels enormous; if you already own a paid-off home, far smaller. Taxes (state income, local sales) are not fully captured. Lifestyle assumptions matter: someone who walks and uses transit in NYC may live very differently from a car-dependent suburban household at the same headline index. For real relocation decisions, treat this calculator as a starting orientation, then dig into the specific line items that drive your budget.
A different city changes your retirement target too. Plug the new income into our retirement projection and see how the math shifts — or read how much you actually need to retire for the full target-setting method.