A checklist for picking a metro with the leftover calculator

Write down, off this site, the constraints leftover cannot see: a partner's job that is only in one region, a parent who needs to be within a drive, a visa, a house you are not willing to sell, a school year you will not interrupt. Those are hard filters. The calculator does the rest.

Then decide two things the form will ask immediately:

• Remote or local pay. Remote holds your salary constant in every metro. Local scales it by that metro's wage level for the occupation. This is usually the highest-leverage switch on the site. If you do not know, run both and keep both shortlists.
• The unit you will rent. Studio, one, two, three, four. Use the bedrooms you would sign next June, not the bedrooms you have now. A couple that “could squeeze into one” and then does not will pick the wrong metros.

On the homepage, fill job (or a custom salary), adults, kids, kids under five, bedrooms, and where you live now. Childcare in the model is full-time for each child under five; if someone is staying home, set under-five to zero or leftover will look worse than your real month.

Leave the fit sliders alone on the first pass. They mix leftover with weather, city life and commute. That is useful after you have a money shortlist. On the first pass you want leftover to be leftover. Setting every slider to zero ranks on money only — the methodology says so, and it is the right first sort.

Open full metro rankings. You should see a stack of leftover numbers for the household you just set. Do not start at #1 and work down like a leaderboard. Start at the first city you would actually live in, then the second, and throw out anything you cannot picture for a reason that is not leftover (no visa lawyer, no airport, family veto).

A useful target is four metros. Two is too few — one listing market will be ugly the week you look. Twelve is tourism. Four is a weekend of research.

If the top of the list is all tiny metros you have never heard of and you are not remote, you probably left local pay on with a high-cost-metro salary in your head. Flip remote off, or type the salary you would actually be offered in Tulsa.

For each survivor, open the paycheck page. How to read a city page is the longer version. The short version:

• Leftover first. If it is negative or thin, the city is off the list unless you change the household.
• Tax line next — state income tax, city wage tax, property tax rate.
• Rent at your bedroom count, not the two-bedroom default if that is not your unit.
• Transport: can you skip a car? The daily-life tile says so in one sentence.
• County table, if it is there. Metro leftover is an average. The county you would actually rent in may not be.

Then open housing and costs for the same city. If you will buy, housing is the headline. If you have young kids, costs plus the kids topic is the headline. Do not skip to movers or daily life until leftover still works.

When two leftover numbers are within a few hundred dollars a month, open a head-to-head. Chicago vs Austin, New York vs Raleigh, Los Angeles → Denver — same household, both tax codes, rent at the same bedrooms. The from-to pages also show IRS households that already made the move, which is a useful “are we inventing this?” check.

Do not average leftover across the four cities and call that your budget. You will live in one of them. The compare is there to explain a close gap, not to produce a blended city that does not exist.

After you have a shortlist, use the homepage chips or the form to change exactly one input:

• Remote on/off.
• One more bedroom.
• A partner salary, or none.
• One fewer child in daycare.

Watch whether the same four cities survive. If the shortlist completely replaces itself, that input was the decision, not the metros. Write it down. The leftover vs index guide explains why a COL percentage would have hidden that.

Leftover has done its job when you have four names and a sense of which lever matters. The next work is not on this site:

• Listings at the bedroom count you used, in the counties you would actually live in.
• One conversation with someone who files taxes in that state, if leftover is close.
• Schools, licensing, and the partner's job market — off-site, on purpose.
• A moving-cost range on the city's getting-there page, treated as a range, then a real quote.

If a figure on a city page looks wrong, email contact with a source. The site is maintained; stale rent and a missed local tax are the kind of thing that gets fixed. The about page says who does that and how often the data is refreshed.

Do not come back the next night and re-rank sixty-six cities for fun. That is how leftover turns back into a slot machine. Use the mistakes guide if you catch yourself reaching for a single COL percentage again.