Where every number comes from
Six datasets sit behind this site. All six are published by an identifiable body, all six have a vintage, and none of them are scraped, modelled or estimated. Here they are with their licences and their links.
1. BEA Regional Price Parities, all items
| What it is | An index of the price level in a metro or state against the national average for the same year, where 100 is the national average. Built from Consumer Price Index price quotes plus American Community Survey rent data. |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Bureau of Economic Analysis, US Department of Commerce. Tables MARPP (metro) and SARPP (state), LineCode 1. |
| Vintage in use | 2024 reference year, released February 19, 2026. |
| Coverage here | 71 metros and 51 states and territories including the District of Columbia, loaded verbatim from BEA's bulk file. |
| Update cycle | Annual. Recent vintages have landed in December; this one arrived in February 2026. The next is expected December 2026. |
| Licence | A work of the US federal government, not subject to copyright in the United States under 17 U.S.C. § 105. BEA asks that its data be cited. |
| Link | bea.gov, Regional Price Parities by state and metro area |
Two things about this dataset that are easy to get wrong
Vintages must never be mixed. BEA doesn't append a year to the existing series. Each annual release restates the whole history from 2008 forward. Methodology changes in December 2021, which altered how housing rent is handled, and December 2022, which altered utility coverage, mean that a 2015 value from the 2019 vintage and a 2015 value from this vintage are different numbers describing the same year. Any refresh here re-pulls the entire series. Nothing is ever appended.
RPP is spatial, not temporal. It compares a place against the country in the same year. It is not an inflation measure, and a metro can fall on the trend chart in a year when its own prices rose sharply, because everywhere else rose faster. No page here describes an RPP trend as inflation.
One practical note on joining this data: match on BEA's GeoFIPS code, never on the metro name. The Office of Management and Budget renames metros. Austin-Round Rock became Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, Denver-Aurora-Lakewood became Denver-Aurora-Centennial, and Pennsylvania was dropped from the New York MSA. Name matching breaks silently.
2. BEA Regional Price Parities by category
| What it is | The same index broken into four spending groups: goods, housing services, utilities, and other services. LineCodes 2 through 5 of the same table. |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Bureau of Economic Analysis, table MARPP. |
| Vintage in use | 2024, same release as the all-items figure. Same restatement rule applies. |
| Coverage here | 71 metros. |
| Licence | Same as above, US federal government work. |
| Link | apps.bea.gov, regional data bulk downloads |
This is the more useful half of the price data and the headline number hides it. A metro can be 11% above average overall while its groceries are near average and its housing is 50% above. Which one applies to you depends on whether you rent, and that's a decision the all-items index can't inform.
3. HUD Fair Market Rents
| What it is | The 40th-percentile gross rent, meaning rent plus essential utilities, for a standard-quality unit in an area, by bedroom count. Used to set housing voucher payment standards. |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Office of Policy Development and Research, US Department of Housing and Urban Development, published through HUD USER. |
| Vintage in use | Fiscal year 2026. |
| Coverage here | 71 metro areas, using HUD's own area names. |
| Update cycle | Annual, effective at the start of the federal fiscal year on October 1, with proposed figures published earlier in the year. |
| Licence | US federal government work, not subject to copyright. |
| Link | huduser.gov, Fair Market Rents |
An FMR is deliberately not an average and not a market asking rent. It sits below what listings ask, by construction. It's used here because it's the one rent figure with a defined, published methodology that covers every metro on the same basis, and because "what does a normal place cost" is a question a price index can't answer on its own.
HUD's geography doesn't match BEA's. HUD splits large metros into sub-areas: Seattle into Seattle-Bellevue and Tacoma, New York into seven. The sub-area containing the principal city is the one used, and its HUD name is printed alongside the figure so the attribution is visible rather than assumed.
4. IRS inflation adjustments for tax year 2026
| What it is | The federal standard deduction and the seven marginal rate brackets for each filing status, adjusted for inflation. |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Internal Revenue Service, Revenue Procedure 2025-32. |
| Vintage in use | Tax year 2026, the figures as published. |
| Update cycle | Annual, usually published in the autumn preceding the tax year. |
| Licence | US federal government work, not subject to copyright. |
| Link | irs.gov, Revenue Procedure 2025-32 (PDF) |
5. Social Security and Medicare parameters
| What it is | The Social Security taxable wage base, the employee contribution rates, and the additional Medicare thresholds. |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Social Security Administration, annual cost-of-living adjustment release. Medicare thresholds are set in statute and aren't indexed. |
| Vintage in use | 2026. |
| Update cycle | Annual, announced in October alongside the benefit cost-of-living adjustment. |
| Licence | US federal government work, not subject to copyright. |
| Link | ssa.gov, cost-of-living adjustment information |
A verification note worth stating: ssa.gov returns a 403 to automated requests, so the wage base used here was confirmed by reading two independent published sources against each other rather than by fetching the SSA page directly.
6. State income tax schedules
| What it is | Bracket schedules or flat rates, standard deductions, and personal exemptions for 51 jurisdictions: the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. Plus the employee-paid disability and paid-leave contribution rates in California, New York and New Jersey. |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Each state's department of revenue or equivalent, as the primary source. The Tax Foundation's annual state individual income tax table is used as a cross-check, not as the source of record. |
| Vintage in use | Tax year 2026 for the states marked verified. Three states carry 2025 figures and are gated rather than published. |
| Update cycle | Re-verified every January, and again whenever a state cuts rates mid-session. Five states did that in 2026, retroactive to January 1. |
| Licence | State statutes and revenue department publications are public records. The Tax Foundation is an independent nonprofit and its publications are its own copyright; it's consulted here, not reproduced. |
| Link | taxfoundation.org, state individual income tax rates and brackets |
The mid-year cuts applied on top of the reference table for 2026 are Arkansas HB 1001, South Carolina H.4216 (Act 110), West Virginia SB 392, and rate reductions in Georgia and Utah. Each was retroactive to January 1, which is why a reference table dated February was already out of date for those five states.
Geography
Metro boundaries follow the Office of Management and Budget's current delineations of metropolitan statistical areas, which BEA applies across its whole back-series. That means a 2008 figure in the trend data describes today's county footprint, not the footprint that existed in 2008. Metros are keyed internally on BEA GeoFIPS, which survives the renamings that break name matching.
What isn't here
No proprietary dataset is used anywhere on this site. No user-submitted cost-of-living figures, no scraped listing prices, no commercial salary survey, no vendor API. If a number can't be traced to one of the six sources above, it isn't published.
That has a cost worth naming. Federal data is slower than commercial data. The price index in use describes 2024, not this month. For a question about relative price levels between metros that's the right trade, because the ranking moves slowly. For a question about what a specific apartment costs today, it isn't, and you should go look at listings.
Related
The methodology page shows how these datasets combine into a take-home and real-value figure, and lists what the calculation leaves out. The updates page records when each dataset last changed.