Add up your real monthly costs and see the gross salary you need to cover them, save, and pay taxes — the number to live comfortably. ✓ Instant
Comfortable salary
"Comfortable" means covering your needs, enjoying some wants, and still saving — without living paycheck to paycheck. Add your monthly housing, essentials, lifestyle spending and savings goal to get your net monthly need; multiply by 12 for the year; then gross it up for taxes (gross = net ÷ (1 − tax rate)) to find the salary you actually need to earn.
A useful guideline is the 50/30/20 rule: about 50% of take-home for needs, 30% for wants, 20% for savings — and keeping housing under ~30% of income. Costs vary enormously by city, so plug in your real numbers. Estimate only.
Cost-of-living comparisons use index numbers where 100 represents a national average, so a city at 187 is 87% more expensive than the baseline. The overall index conceals enormous variation between components: housing routinely differs by a factor of four between US metros while groceries rarely differ by more than 30%, so the headline number understates the impact on renters and overstates it on people who already own outright. The comparison also ignores state income tax entirely, which can swing the real answer by several thousand dollars a year.
Equivalent salary = Current salary × (destination index ÷ origin index)Component-weighted = Σ (your spending share × that component's index ratio)Real change = Equivalent salary − actual offered salarywhere:
Assumptions: Index composition varies by publisher, so figures from different sources are not interchangeable. Excludes state income tax, which is a large omission when comparing, say, Texas with California.
Convert a salary using the index, then check what tax does to the answer.
ResultNeeds about $171,450 to match $85,000 in Austin
The index alone understates the gap by nearly $12,500 because it ignores income tax. Housing is doing most of the work in that 187 figure, so the comparison is harsher for a renter than for someone whose employer provides accommodation or who would own outright.