A recruiter offers you $120,000 in Austin. You're in Minneapolis on $100,000. Raise, right? Maybe. Maybe not. The dollar figure is the easy part — what it buys is the decision.
Our salary translator exists because "same salary" almost never means "same life."
Three things move the number
Taxes. Texas has no state income tax; Minnesota's top rate is near 10%. That gap alone can be worth several thousand dollars a year before you've changed anything else. We use current statutory rates, and the effective property-tax rate we compute live from Census data — what people actually pay as a share of their home's value, not the sticker rate.
Housing. Rent and home prices are the single biggest swing in most moves, and they're intensely local. We pull county-level home values and rents from Zillow and the Census, not a national average that hides the truth about your actual destination.
Everything else. Groceries, utilities, getting around. We anchor the cost-of-living comparison to the BEA's Regional Price Parities — the federal government's own measure of how far a dollar stretches in one metro versus another.
Why we show our work
The translator doesn't just spit out an "equivalent salary" and ask you to believe it. It shows the pieces: what you keep after taxes, what rent takes back, what the cost-of-living delta does to the rest. If a $120k offer in one city is really worth $94k of your current life, you should be able to see exactly why — and decide whether the other reasons for the move make up the difference.
Sometimes the raise is real. Sometimes it's a pay cut wearing a bigger number. The point is to know which one you're being offered before you sign.