A recruiter offers you $120,000 in Austin. You're in Minneapolis on $100,000. A raise, obviously. Maybe. The dollar figure is the easy part: what it buys is the actual decision, and it can land anywhere from "life-changing raise" to "quiet pay cut" depending on three things the offer letter never mentions.
Our salary translator exists because "same salary" almost never means "same life."
Three levers move the real number
Taxes. Texas has no state income tax; Minnesota's top rate runs near 10%. That gap alone can be worth several thousand dollars a year before you change a single other thing. We use current statutory rates, and we compute the effective property-tax rate live from Census data: what people in that place actually pay as a share of their home's value, not the headline rate a state likes to quote.
Housing. Rent and home prices are the biggest single swing in most moves, and they are intensely local. We pull county-level values and rents from Zillow and the Census, not a national average that politely hides the truth about your specific destination. Moving from Cleveland to San Diego, housing is something like 80% of the entire gap.
Everything else. Groceries, utilities, getting around. We anchor that to the BEA's Regional Price Parities: the federal government's own measure of how far a dollar stretches in one metro versus another.
We show our work, on purpose
The translator doesn't hand you an "equivalent salary" and ask you to take it on faith. 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 then decide whether the other reasons for the move make up the difference. (They sometimes do. Mountains and zero state income tax are real things.)
Curious where your own number lands? Translate a salary across two cities, or see which moves people are running right now. Sometimes the raise is exactly what it looks like. The point is to know which offer you're holding before you sign it.