Cost of living

US data layers federal public-domain sources: Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities (RPPs) for state/metro multipliers; Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) for median wages; HUD Fair Market Rents for 2-bedroom housing costs; Census American Community Survey for median household income, life expectancy and commute; FBI Uniform Crime Reports for crime rates; Visual Capitalist's annual "salary needed to live comfortably" report for the top featured cities. Country data uses Numbeo's Quality of Life Index (NYC=100 baseline) cross-referenced with CEO World rankings and OECD Better Life Index.

Three different bars. Living wage (single adult, MIT methodology) is the bare-minimum income to cover food, housing, transport, healthcare, and basic essentials in a given metro — no savings, no discretionary spend. Median household income is what a typical household actually earns there (Census ACS). Comfortable salary is what's needed to cover the basics plus retirement contributions, restaurant meals, vacations, and discretionary spending — substantially higher than the living wage. The affordability gauge plots your salary against all three.

The federal poverty line is a 1963 formula based on three times the cost of a minimum food diet. It hasn't been updated to reflect modern housing, healthcare, or childcare realities, and it's a single national number — useless for comparing cities. CPI has its own gaps for cost-of-living estimation: it assigns less than 25% weight to housing rent (assumes most Americans own their homes), and it largely ignores out-of-pocket health-insurance premiums. Using BEA RPP × HUD FMR × MIT-style wage formulas instead gives a localized, modernized estimate.

It's a model, not a quote. Real-life costs depend on family size, school choices, commute pattern, healthcare needs, lifestyle, and household-specific factors that no aggregate index captures. Treat the numbers as directionally correct (higher RPPs really do mean costlier housing; higher median wages really do mean better job markets) and within roughly 5–10% of the average resident's experience. Don't use any single line item as exact.

v1 ships with the 10 cities from Visual Capitalist's "comfortable salary" report plus 30 of the largest US metros. Adding all 3,144 US counties (the MIT Living Wage scope) is on the roadmap and well-supported by the data layer — once the dataset is integrated, every county will get the same dashboard treatment.

They're Numbeo's top 20 by Quality of Life Index for the most recent reporting period, cross-referenced with CEO World and OECD rankings. Numbeo can be skewed by crowdsourced bias (zero-tax states with subsidized healthcare can outrank liberal democracies just on purchasing power), so the multi-source cross-check gives a more defensible top-20.