How we figure this

The letter on a city page is for this household. Most of it is leftover versus your home city. A year with 220 sunny days nudges it up one step. A January low under 25°F nudges it down one step. It is not a grade of the city.

A car or a plane on a route uses straight-line miles between the two metro centers. Under 550 miles it shows a car. At 550 or more, a plane. That is not a driving route.

If you pick local market pay, your salary is scaled by how wages compare in the two metros. A nurse earning $95,000 in Chicago is estimated at roughly $122,000 in San Jose and $88,000 in Tulsa. That is what the local market pays for the same work.

If you pick remote, your salary stays the same in every city. That switch usually matters more than anything else you can change. You keep a high-cost city's pay and a low-cost city's rent.

Leave salary blank and the calculator uses the national median for your occupation, adjusted to your current metro. Job pages are different: they use the BLS OEWS May 2025 median for that job in that metro when one was published.

Taxes come off gross wages in this order:

• Federal income tax. 2025 ordinary-income brackets and the standard deduction, for single, married filing jointly, or head of household. One adult with kids is treated as head of household.
• Social Security and Medicare. 6.2% up to the $176,100 wage base, 1.45% with no cap, plus the 0.9% additional Medicare tax over the threshold. The Social Security cap applies per earner, not per household. That matters for two-income couples.
• State income tax. Each state is one of three kinds: no wage tax, a flat rate, or a bracket schedule. The state's standard deduction comes off first. Joint filers get roughly doubled bracket widths.
• City and county wage tax. Flat rates where they exist. Philadelphia, New York City, Baltimore, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, and Louisville look worse here than on sites that skip these taxes.
• Child tax credit. $2,000 per child. It phases out by $50 for each $1,000 of income over the threshold.

Not included: itemised deductions, 401(k) and HSA contributions, self-employment tax, the earned income credit, capital gains, or any state-specific credit. If you max a 401(k), your real tax rate is lower than what you see here. That is true in every city, so the ranking barely moves.

Rent is priced at the bedroom count you choose, not a citywide average. That is the biggest flaw in index-style comparisons. A studio and a three-bedroom in the same city are not the same budget. The gap between them is not the same in every metro.

One measured two-bedroom asking rent is stored for each metro. The other sizes use national ratios (studio 0.72×, one-bed 0.84×, three-bed 1.31×, four-bed 1.55×). Those ratios are a national assumption, and a rough one. The measured gap between single-family and apartment asking rents runs from 1.00× in New York to 1.59× in Austin. This overstates large units in apartment markets and understates them in sprawling ones.

That two-bedroom figure comes from Zillow, not from a federal median. The choice matters. Census medians cover the whole rental stock, including long-held and rent-stabilised leases. They sit far below a new lease where turnover is slow (41% below in New York) and close to it where building is fast. That bias always runs the same way. It would quietly make the most expensive metros look like the affordable ones. HUD Fair Market Rents lean the other way. They are 40th-percentile rents for standard-quality units, set for housing assistance, not to describe the market. Both are recorded next to every metro so you can see the spread.

The buy-instead figure on each city page is principal and interest on 80% of the median home at 6.5% over 30 years. It also adds that metro's effective property tax rate, and 1.1% a year for insurance and upkeep.

These start from national monthly amounts. They scale with the people in the household, then with how expensive the metro is outside of rent.

• Groceries: $400 per adult, $250 per child
• Healthcare: $450 per adult, $170 per child, premiums and out-of-pocket together
• Utilities and internet: $210 plus $40 per person
• Getting around: $150 per adult, plus up to $520 more depending on how car-dependent the metro is. This is why New York can beat cheaper cities for a single person. Skipping a car is a real raise.
• Childcare: $1,150 per child under five, full time. This is often the largest line after rent.
• Everything else: $350 per adult for clothes, phone, entertainment, and the rest

Left out on purpose: debt payments, tuition, travel, and savings goals. Those are yours, not the city's.

You set five sliders, each from zero to three. Every metro gets a score from 0 to 100 on each one. The weighted average is the fit score used for ranking.

• Money left over. Your monthly leftover, compared with the best and worst metro for your household. Change your household and the scale changes.
• Sun and mild weather. 55% sunny days, 45% a comfort score that penalises July highs above 92°F and January lows below 26°F.
• Outdoors and city life. Judgement calls from 0 to 100, not survey data. These are the softest numbers on the site.
• Short commute. Average one-way commute, scaled between 18 and 38 minutes.

Set every slider to zero and the ranking uses money alone.

66 metros were reviewed by hand. Wage levels, costs besides rent, car dependency, climate, and the two editorial scores were set one city at a time and checked against the sources below. The other 321 metropolitan areas are built from public data. Rent comes from Zillow, or from the Census median lifted toward asking rent where Zillow has no series. Wages and commutes come from the Census. Prices come from the BEA. Climate comes from Open-Meteo. The two editorial scores are estimates based on the hand-reviewed cities.

Modelled metros are fine for ranking and comparison. Their pages say they are modelled. Of those two editorial scores, only city life still affects the ranking. Read it as a measure of size. It tracks log population, with a correlation of 0.944. The outdoors score no longer counts toward fit. The estimate behind it explains only about a fifth of the variance in the metros it was based on.

Inside every metro, the county table on the city page comes from Census 5-year county estimates. You can see which county is behind the rent quoted for the metro.

The moving estimate on each city's Getting there page uses the road distance between the two metro centers (straight-line distance times 1.2). The cost has a base fee, a per-bedroom charge, and a per-mile rate. There are three service levels: full-service, container, and a rented truck. The rates follow published 2024–25 ranges. It is a typical range, not a quote. Peak season (May to September) runs about 15% higher.

That page does not rate movers or show their photos. It links out to a Google search, Yelp, and the FMCSA registry so you can check a company yourself.

All 16 of these are free and public. Zillow, HUD, and Census figures are refreshed from those publications (last refreshed 2026-09-04). The rest are updated by hand each year.

The monthly leftover leaderboard runs the same leftover math three times. The paychecks are $80k, $120k, and $160k, held flat (the remote setting). One adult, filing single, renting a one-bedroom. Metros are sorted by leftover. Only metros with at least 500,000 people are included. It is the same estimate, not a cost-of-living index. City links open the calculator with those inputs. Each table also links to the full leftover ranking for that paycheck.

It is not tax advice, a rent quote, or a mortgage pre-approval. The numbers are estimates. They will be wrong in the details. Use them to pick which cities are worth a real look. Then check listings, and run your numbers past someone who files taxes for a living. The disclaimer says what the site does and does not promise.