Tool · Money
Pick the state you're in, the state you're comparing and your salary, and the calculator shows the salary in the second state that buys the same as yours does now — for everything together, and separately for rent, for goods and for other services — using the federal government's index of price levels by state.
Where does each number come from?
- The state you're in, and the state you're comparing
- States and the District of Columbia. The index behind the calculator is published by state, so a move from one city to another inside the same state shows no change here even when the two cities are very different, and a move from a small town in one state to a big city in another shows the state-level gap and not the town-to-city one. That’s a real limit, and it’s why the page says “by state” in its name.
- Your salary
- Gross, per year — what’s on your offer letter or your most recent W-2.
- Your rent, per month
- Optional. With it, the calculator runs the rent index on your real number, which is usually the biggest single difference between two places.
What moves the answer?
Let’s say you make $80,000 in Ohio and you’re looking at California. Ohio’s overall price level is about 7% below the national average and California’s about 11% above it, so the same $80,000 of buying power in California is about $95,000 — around $15,000 more a year for the same life.
Rent moves further than anything else. Ohio’s rent index is about 73 and California’s about 154 against a national 100, so $1,200 a month in Ohio is about $2,500 a month in California for the same kind of place — about $1,300 more every month, or roughly $16,000 a year on rent alone. Goods barely move by comparison: groceries and clothes in California run about 6% above the national average and Ohio about 6% below, a gap of about twelve points against rent’s eighty. Which is why two people can make the same move and feel it completely differently: the renter feels California, and the person who already owns a paid-off house mostly feels the grocery bill.
What does the calculator take as given?
- The index
- Is the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s regional price parities for 2024, released 19 February 2026. It puts the national price level at 100 and each state above or below it: California highest at 110.7, Hawaii 110.0, New Jersey 108.8, the District of Columbia 109.9; Arkansas lowest at 86.9, then Mississippi at 87.0, Iowa and Oklahoma at 87.8. The BEA publishes separate parities for goods, for rents, for utilities and for other services, and the calculator shows all four. The next release, with 2025 figures, is scheduled for 10 December 2026.
- Rents, not house prices
- The BEA’s rent index is built from what tenants pay. It doesn’t measure home prices or mortgages, which is why the rent line is the one to read if you rent and only a rough guide if you’d buy.
- Why states and not cities
- The BEA used to publish the same index for metropolitan areas, and with the 2024 release it stopped, saying the figures will continue “by state and local areas”. Other calculators that compare cities run on a privately published index sold by subscription. This one runs on the public federal data, and that data stops at the state line.
- What's left out
- State and local income tax, which changes take-home pay as much as prices do and isn’t in a price index — each state’s revenue department publishes its rate table. Differences within a state. What your particular job pays in the new place. And sales tax, which the BEA folds into its goods prices rather than listing separately.
Eighty thousand dollars and a twelve-hundred-dollar rent are one made-up move; your W-2 and your lease carry your two numbers, and the state tax table for the place you're looking at is the next thing to open after this page.
Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Real Personal Consumption Expenditures by State and Real Personal Income by State, 2024”, news release BEA 26-10, 19 February 2026 — regional price parities by state; the statement discontinuing metropolitan-area statistics.
- U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Price Parities by State (table SARPP), 2008–2024, last updated 19 February 2026 — all items, goods, services: housing, services: utilities, services: other, for the fifty states and the District of Columbia.