About Money Moves

A salary is a number until you know what it buys where you'd spend it. This site does that arithmetic, city by city, from federal data.

What it is

Money Moves takes a gross salary or an hourly wage, subtracts federal income tax, FICA, state income tax and mandatory state payroll taxes, then divides what's left by the local price level published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The result is what that pay is actually worth in that place, compared with an average-priced part of the country.

That's the whole product. There are also two calculators, one for comparing the cost of living between two places and one for projecting investment growth, but the salary and hourly pages are the reason the site exists.

Who makes it

One person, working alone. There's no editorial team, no office, and no institution behind this. The tax tables were assembled by hand against primary sources, the price data is loaded verbatim from BEA's published files, and the calculation is a few hundred lines of code that every page runs identically.

I'm not a tax professional, an accountant, or a financial adviser, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise to make the site look more authoritative. What I can defend is the arithmetic and the provenance: every input is public, every input is cited on the data sources page, and every simplification is listed on the methodology page rather than buried.

How it's maintained

The data has a schedule and the site follows it. Federal tax figures and all 51 state schedules get re-verified every January against primary sources, because bracket widths are inflation-indexed and states cut rates mid-session. BEA's price index is refreshed whenever a new vintage lands, and the entire back-series is re-pulled rather than extended, because BEA restates its own history with each release. HUD rents refresh with the federal fiscal year.

Currently in use: tax year 2026, and the BEA 2024 price vintage. When any of that changes it gets dated on the updates page.

What happens when the data isn't good enough

Pages for a state whose current-year tax figures can't be confirmed don't publish. They don't publish with a disclaimer, and they don't fall back on last year's brackets. They return a 404 until the figures are confirmed. Three states are in that position right now, and their metros are simply absent from the site.

The same rule produced the most embarrassing correction in this site's short history. An early version shipped price index values that had been generated rather than loaded from BEA, and they were wrong by as much as 15 index points on the largest metros. They were replaced with BEA's published file in August 2026 and the correction is logged on the updates page. It stays logged.

This isn't financial advice

Money Moves publishes computed figures for general information. It isn't financial, tax, investment or legal advice. It doesn't know your credits, your retirement deferrals, your deductions, your filing situation, your debts or your plans, and several of those change the answer by more than the differences the site is measuring. Before you move cities or negotiate a number, talk to someone who can look at your actual situation.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, it's worth telling me, and it will be fixed and dated rather than edited away. The methodology page is specific enough that most disagreements can be settled by checking which input differs.