Occupational pay — May 2025
The application uses the public US Wage Atlas dataset by Andrey Soloviev, which aggregates wages from the BLS OEWS May 2025 release and links them to BEA Regional Price Parities 2024 metro-area price parities. Downloaded snapshot: October 8, 2026. The resulting lookup contains 47,380 rows, 368 occupations and 387 paired metro areas. Each entry offers a 25th percentile, median and 75th percentile where present. There are more BLS areas in the official source than in this linked dataset.
Regional purchasing power — 2024
BEA Regional Price Parities regional price-parity factors are indexed to a U.S. average of 100. We show these indicators as economic context for evaluating market differences; we do not present them as forecasts, rents, or current retail prices. The BEA reference vintage can differ from the wage release period.
Housing reference — fiscal year 2027
HUD Fair Market Rents provides public county-level spreadsheets of Fair Market Rents (FMRs), including revised program estimates. The site prepares a separate county-area lookup when the downloadable file passes validation. This data is not a live market inventory: an advertised apartment, negotiated lease, security deposit, and tenant fees may be very different.
Tax assumptions — entered by visitors
There is no hidden tax service and no bundled state tax rates. Users provide effective tax-rate assumptions to keep the output auditable and avoid suggesting that a single number can describe every taxpayer. Consider official federal and state tax resources and your payroll details before relying on an estimate.
Data integrity principles
- Do not substitute a national median for a suppressed metro estimate.
- Do not silently combine mismatched BLS and HUD metro geographies.
- Do not call wage surveys job offers, or HUD payment standards apartment listings.
- Do not extrapolate missing tax, mortgage, healthcare or utility prices.
- Make the year and origin of every benchmark visible; a failed feed should be shown as unavailable.
Where to verify directly
Official wage: BLS OEWS. Official regional cost indices: BEA Regional Price Parities. Official rent benchmarks: HUD Fair Market Rents. Every source is available to inspect independently, without an account to read the published files.