What salary is truly comparable in another city?
Your $100,000 paycheck doesn't buy the same basket in every U.S. metro. Translate your gross salary using regional price levels, inspect actual occupation wage medians, then check your real rent and taxes before accepting an offer.
Compare two metropolitan areas.
Choose any two available U.S. metros and an occupation. Personal salaries and offers are optional; if you leave them blank, the tool reports survey medians only, never a fictional paycheck.
Enter a current salary to calculate your personal RPP-equivalent gross pay.
BEA RPP 2024 estimates regional price differences, not your household's tax or rent.What the occupation survey actually reports
Historic May 2025 BLS wage medians; not current offers.
Compare your own housing, benefit and tax figures before relying on a price-level adjustment.
Sharing includes the salary numbers you entered in the URL; use only if you choose to disclose them.
Pick a role and two metro areas. The page begins with a small catalog and loads the full licensed wage data only after you request an analysis.
What does “salary equivalent” really mean?
The Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes regional price parities (RPP): indexes that compare the overall price level of a region with a national benchmark of 100. If the origin has an index of 100 and the destination 110, a simple purchasing-power benchmark would scale a $100,000 gross salary to approximately $110,000. This is a regional price-level exercise, not a payroll or cost-of-living guarantee.
Our actual calculation is straightforward: your annual gross salary × (destination RPP ÷ origin RPP). We show the underlying indices and the implied percentage change so you can challenge the result. The index is from 2024 while available occupation salary observations are from May 2025; these years are intentionally shown separately.
Austin → Denver
A $100,000 gross salary in Austin scales to about $107,862 in Denver using this one index alone. The calculation says nothing about an actual Denver apartment, state tax bill, employer benefits or household circumstances.
Why compare the same occupation in both cities?
A salary-equivalence threshold is just a model. An employer may pay below or above it. The BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics supply median wage estimates for specific occupations and metro areas. After you select a job, the comparator retrieves its recorded May 2025 median in both markets when available. If a metro-occupation value is suppressed or absent, the result says so instead of quietly replacing it with a national average.
For an additional perspective, we translate the origin area's survey median using the RPP ratio and show how the destination area's survey median compares. That is a comparison between published statistical benchmarks, never an individual job-offer assessment. Your own annual salary, if supplied, is shown in a separate outcome.
Three things a regional price index will not tell you
- How much you personally pay for housing. Rentals differ by neighborhood, bedroom count, location and current listings. We intentionally never turn an RPP index into a made-up rent quote; a HUD Fair Market Rent also is not a live listing.
- What you take home after tax. Filing status, federal and state tax rules, payroll deductions and benefits vary. A gross-salary index conversion does not calculate any of these.
- Whether you can survive the transition. Movers, deposits, overlapping leases, bonus timing and savings buffer may matter more than the annual gross difference.