A friend of mine took a lateral move from Austin to San Francisco a few years back — same title, same salary, same org chart. He called it a wash. Eight months later he was eating cereal for dinner and wondering where all his money had gone.
The number on his offer letter never changed. Everything around that number did.
That’s the trap in most relocation conversations: we treat salary like a fixed, portable thing, when it’s really a ratio. What a paycheck is worth depends on what it costs to live where that paycheck lands. Move the location, and the math resets — even if the digits on the pay stub don’t.
“Same salary” isn’t automatically fair
When someone says “just keep my salary the same,” that can be a stealth raise if you’re moving somewhere cheaper — or a quiet pay cut if you’re moving somewhere pricier. The fix is figuring out the salary that buys the same lifestyle in the new city, not the same number of dollars.
The formula is simple: equivalent salary = current salary × (cost-of-living index of the new city ÷ cost-of-living index of the current city). These indices are built so 100 equals the national average.
Run it on a classic move — $100,000 in San Francisco (index around 165) relocating to Austin (index around 96) — and the equivalent salary comes out to roughly $58,000. San Francisco dollars are working about 42% harder than Austin dollars, at least by that basket of costs. Flip the move around, and an $80,000 Austin salary would need to climb to something like $137,000 to keep pace in San Francisco.
Where cost of living stops and taxes take over
That formula covers spending power, but it’s silent on what the government keeps. Nine states — including Texas, Florida, and Washington — charge zero income tax on wages, so a move out of a high-tax state can boost take-home well beyond what the cost-of-living gap alone suggests. The same logic plays out across Canadian provinces: Alberta’s combined tax rate runs several points below Ontario’s, worth roughly $7,000–$8,000 a year on a $150,000 CAD salary.
There are sharper edges too. California keeps a tax claim on unvested RSUs based on workdays spent in-state during the vesting period, even years after you’ve moved. And New York can tax remote workers as full-year residents if they keep an apartment there and spend more than half the year in it, regardless of where they’re officially registered to vote.
Numbers beat gut feeling in a negotiation
“I’d like a cost-of-living adjustment” is a request. “Based on the gap between these two cities, I’d need roughly $X to keep the same purchasing power” is a negotiation your employer can verify.
The [relocation salary calculator](Relocation Salary Calculator) at https://paychecktaxcalculator.net runs this comparison for 90+ US and Canadian cities — equivalent salary, after-tax take-home in both places, and optional rent, commute, and moving-cost breakdowns. It’s free, no account needed, and gives you something concrete to hand straight to an employer.
Whatever’s prompting the move, it’s worth five minutes to see what your salary is actually worth on the other end.
