Find the equivalent salary you'd need in another city to keep the same purchasing power, using your own current salary and a cost-of-living index for each city, computed instantly in your browser.
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A salary that sounds impressive in one city can mean something very different in another, because the cost of everyday life — housing, groceries, transportation, and services — is not the same everywhere. This calculator answers a focused question: given your current salary and a cost-of-living index for both your current city and a city you're comparing against, what salary in the other city would give you the same real purchasing power? The math is a simple ratio — your salary multiplied by the destination city's index divided by your current city's index — but the indexes themselves are not built into this tool. Cost-of-living data changes constantly and comes from many different sources with different methodologies, so you supply the index for each city yourself, from whichever source you trust, keeping the result accurate and consistent with your own research.
Comparing a salary offer in one city to your current salary in another only makes sense once you account for how far each amount actually goes. A cost-of-living index is the standard tool for this: it's a number, anchored to a chosen baseline (commonly 100), that reflects the relative price level of goods and services in a given location. A city with an index of 130 is roughly 30% more expensive than the baseline city; a city with an index of 85 is roughly 15% cheaper. By expressing two different cities' living costs on the same numerical scale, an index lets you scale a salary figure from one city to its equivalent in another.
The calculation itself is a simple ratio: take your current salary, multiply it by the destination city's index, and divide by your current city's index. If your salary and city both have an index of 100, and the destination city has an index of 150, you would need 50% more income there just to maintain the same standard of living — not because you're getting a "real" raise, but because everything around you costs more.
What makes this calculation reliable is where the index numbers come from. Multiple organizations — some government statistical agencies, some independent research firms, some crowd-sourced platforms — each publish their own cost-of-living indexes, often using different baseline cities, different market baskets of goods, and different update schedules. Because these sources can disagree meaningfully, this calculator deliberately avoids picking one for you. Instead, you choose a source you trust, look up the index for both cities from that same source, and enter them here — ensuring the two numbers are directly comparable and the resulting salary figure is meaningful.
It's also worth remembering what this calculator does not do: it doesn't account for income tax differences between locations, currency exchange rates if the two cities use different currencies, or non-financial factors like commute time, climate, or personal preference. Those are separate considerations you may want to weigh alongside the purely mathematical cost-of-living adjustment this tool provides.
A cost-of-living index is a number that expresses how expensive a location is relative to a chosen baseline, usually 100. A city with an index of 150 is roughly 50% more expensive than the baseline; a city with an index of 80 is roughly 20% cheaper.
Several independent websites and government statistics agencies publish cost-of-living indexes by city. Pick a source you trust, and make sure you use figures from the same source and the same baseline for both cities, since different sources are not always directly comparable.
Cost-of-living indexes change frequently and vary by data source, so a built-in list would quickly become outdated or inconsistent with the index you actually want to rely on. Entering your own index for each city keeps the calculation accurate and lets you choose whichever source you trust.
No — this calculator only adjusts for relative cost of living using the indexes you provide. If the two cities are in different countries with different tax systems or currencies, you may want to also account for those separately using this site's income tax or currency conversion calculators.
A positive difference means you'd need more income in the other city to maintain the same purchasing power (it's more expensive); a negative difference means you'd need less (it's cheaper).