How to read a city page

The first sentence on a page such as Denver or Raleigh is leftover after tax and rent. Rank (“#12 of 387 for you”) is leftover compared with every other metro on the same household. Change the household and both numbers move. A city that is #4 for a remote software developer can be #80 for a teacher who takes local pay.

Leftover is take-home minus modelled costs. Take-home is federal tax, payroll tax, state income tax, and city wage tax where it applies. Costs are asking rent at your bedroom count plus groceries, healthcare, utilities, transport and childcare scaled to the people in the house. The methodology lists the rates. The leftover vs index guide explains why this is not a cost-of-living percentage.

If leftover is negative, the model is saying this household does not cover the bills it prices. That is information, not a moral judgement. Raise the salary, drop a bedroom, switch to remote, or pick a cheaper metro — the page will say which lever mattered.

Under the title you get three figures:

• Left over monthly — the number the rest of the site ranks on.
• Versus home — leftover here minus leftover in the metro you marked as where you live now. A year figure sits under it because $400 a month is easier to ignore than $4,800 a year.
• Local pay or remote salary — what the model thinks this job earns in this metro, or the salary you typed if you chose remote. The wage-index note tells you whether this market pays above or below the national median for the same work.

If the “versus home” tile says this is your baseline, you are looking at the city you already live in. Pick another city from the directory or from the ranking to get a gap.

The breakdown is the honest part of the page. Rent is usually the largest line. Then tax, then (if you have young children) childcare, then the rest. Transport is the line people skip and then regret: in New York you can often skip a car; in Dallas or Phoenix you cannot. That is why a “cheaper” Sun Belt metro sometimes loses leftover to a dense city once two car payments are in the model.

The costs topic page — Austin costs is the pattern — repeats the breakdown and adds a state electricity cross-check. The housing topic page splits rent versus owning the median home, with property tax and a back-of-envelope months-to-down- payment figure. Neither page is a budget or a lender quote.

Included, because they change with the city or the household:

• Federal, state and city wage taxes on the modelled salary.
• Asking rent at the bedroom count you chose.
• Groceries, healthcare, utilities, a car-or-not transport bundle, and full-time childcare for children under five.

Excluded on purpose:

• Student loans, car notes you already have, credit cards.
• Tuition, private school, travel, hobbies.
• A savings rate. Leftover is what you could save, not what you will.
• Itemised deductions, 401(k) deferrals, HSAs, the earned income credit. If you max a 401(k), your real tax is lower in every city, so the ranking barely moves.

If a line item is the reason you would or would not move — a parent in town, a partner's job that is not in the form, a house you already own — leftover will not see it. Write that on a pad and use the model for the parts that are actually about the city.

Every city has the same set of topic pages. They share your household (it lives in the URL fragment, not on a server) and they stay static, so they do not get regenerated for every visitor.

• Paycheck — leftover and the breakdown. Start here.
• Who moved — IRS county-to-county flows into and out of the metro, when we have them. Useful as a reality check: if nobody with your income band is arriving, leftover may be optimistic.
• Rent vs buy — asking rent, median home, property tax, ownership yardstick.
• Monthly costs — the non-rent bundle, line by line.
• Daily life — CDC homicide and firearm death rates, heat, commute, cars. Metro-wide, not a neighbourhood grade.
• Kids — public-school enrollment and pupil–teacher ratios from NCES, plus what leftover does when you add bedrooms and childcare.
• Getting there — a modelled moving-cost range and, where we have them, highly-rated movers. Not a quote and not an endorsement.

Read paycheck, housing and costs before you read daily life. The soft pages are context. They should not talk you into a metro that does not clear leftover.

The form at the top of the site (and the settings cog) writes job, salary, adults, kids and bedrooms into the address. Share the link and the other person sees the same leftover. Clear the address and you are back to the default: a nurse living alone in Chicago.

Change one thing at a time. The homepage “change one thing” chips exist for this. If you flip remote, add a partner salary, and jump from one bedroom to three in the same breath, you will not know which input moved Denver above Raleigh.

When two metros are within a few hundred dollars a month, stop staring at leftover and open a compare page. Seattle vs Portland runs both tax codes on the same household. That is the right tool for a close call; the city page is the right tool for “is this even in range?”

The point of a city page is to throw metros out. Four left is a good number. Then:

• Look at real asking rents for the bedroom count you used. If the listings are $400 above the model, leftover is $400 worse. The methodology explains why Zillow asking rent is the input and why Census medians run low in slow-turnover markets.
• Check the county table on the city page. Metro leftover is an average of counties that do not cost the same.
• If you have kids, open the schools topic and then leave this site for district report cards and GreatSchools. We publish enrollment and staffing, not quality.
• Run the same household on the metro checklist so you do not skip the remote/local switch or the bedroom count.

Corrections — a rent that looks stale, a metro that should be here, a tax line that seems off — go to contact. A source attached gets fixed fastest.