See what your salary is really worth if you moved to another state. Built by Grace Lambert, Careers & Pay Editor, using official U.S. government price-level data · Reviewed against our editorial standards · Last reviewed 2026
This tool is built on the Regional Price Parities (RPP), an official statistic published every year by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Unlike crowdsourced cost-of-living indexes that rely on user-submitted prices, the RPP is derived from actual government price-survey data and personal consumption expenditure weights for every state. Each state gets an index number where 100 represents the national average — a state at 110 is roughly 10% more expensive to live in than the typical U.S. location, and a state at 90 is roughly 10% cheaper.
To compare two states, the calculator divides the destination state's index by your current state's index, then multiplies your salary by that ratio. If you earn $80,000 in Texas (all-items RPP 97.057) and moved to California (all-items RPP 110.720), you would need roughly $91,262 in California just to match the purchasing power of your Texas salary — before any difference in state income tax is even considered.
Housing is usually the single biggest driver of cost-of-living differences between states, and it is also the most volatile. The BEA separately publishes a Rents RPP that isolates housing costs alone. In many high cost-of-living states, the rent gap is dramatically larger than the all-items gap — for example, California's rent index sits far above its overall index, largely because of how expensive urban housing has become relative to groceries, utilities, and other goods. If your biggest concern about a move is rent or a mortgage rather than everyday spending, switch this calculator to the rent-only view for a sharper comparison.
This is a purchasing-power comparison, not a full relocation budget. It does not account for state or local income tax differences, which can meaningfully change your real take-home pay between states — pair this result with the Gross-to-Net Calculator to estimate after-tax pay in each location. It also does not model city-level cost differences within a state; the RPP is measured at the state level, so cost of living inside a single state can still vary a great deal between a large metro area and a rural county.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Price Parities by State, 2024 annual release. Estimates for informational purposes only — not financial or relocation advice. State income tax and city-level cost differences are not included.