Most "cost of living calculators" do one thing: multiply your salary by a regional price index and call it a day. That gets you into the right ZIP code of an answer, then stops short of the two things that actually decide a move.
What a plain index misses
Housing dominates the gap. National CPI weights housing at roughly a third of spending, but the spread in housing costs between US metros is enormous, far wider than any other category. Average them together and you blur out the one number that matters most. From Cleveland to San Diego, housing is something like 80% of the whole difference; treating it as one-third of the mix quietly lies to you.
Households aren't interchangeable. A single 27-year-old in a studio is exposed to housing completely differently than a family of four buying a four-bedroom. A flat index can't tell them apart. Ours asks who's moving and weights accordingly.
So the translator combines two BEA inputs (Regional Price Parities at state and metro level, and median home values) and applies a household-weighted housing multiplier on top of the base price-parity ratio. Housing gets the influence it actually has, not the influence an average pretends it has.
Then it checks the job market
An "equivalent salary" is only useful if someone will actually pay it. So we show what your specific role typically earns in the destination, drawn from BLS OEWS state wages, and put a market-gap line next to it. If the local median for your job sits below the equivalent salary you'd need, that's worth knowing: it means plenty of people in your role there earn less than what would hold your purchasing power steady. Not a dealbreaker, but not a detail you want to discover after you've signed a lease.
A couple of honest limits: the headline number doesn't yet fold in commute cost, marginal income-tax brackets, or sales tax. Those live in the broader cost-of-living and tax categories of the full report, where they belong, rather than getting smuggled into one figure.
Want to see the breakdown for a real offer? Run it through the translator, or read what $100k is actually worth city to city for the version with numbers attached.