Every US county · tax law
What salary does this place actually need?
Cost-of-living calculators go stale and quietly compare gross salaries. This one works out what a county costs to live in, rent plus everything else, and the salary that clears it. All of it against take-home pay, after federal, state, city and payroll tax.
Step one
Your offer
Start from a real entry-level package, or pick Other and type your own. Compensation is the input you supply; the cost of living is the part kept current for you.
Step two
Where this salary lands
Survival is the salary at which take-home exactly covers necessities. That is MIT's living wage budget, which contains no savings and no discretionary spending. Comfortable is the salary at which those same necessities fit inside half your take-home, leaving the 30% and the 20% of the 50/30/20 rule for everything else.
Where the money actually goes
The monthly cost of one adult living here, broken out. Rent is measured. Everything else is MIT's county-level budget for a single adult, which is a subsistence standard: no savings, no holidays, no meals out.
Tax breakdown for this salary
Step three
The whole country at once
Rent as a share of monthly take-home
The 21 largest tech hubs, at metro level, on Zillow's current asking rents. Base salary only, so no equity and no bonus. This is the number that decides whether you can make rent every month, and the one a total-comp figure flatters most. The dashed line is HUD's 30% cost-burdened threshold.
View as table
Every hub against every offer
Year-1 share of take-home, counting bonus and vested equity. Rows follow the ranking above. This is a snapshot of year one only, and the ordering does not hold: the vesting shapes below pull the packages apart over four years.
How it changes as equity vests
The same offer across four years in one metro. Vesting shape matters as much as the headline total. A front-loaded grant decays as it vests, so whichever offer looks best in year one need not still be ahead in year four.