Your money
Local = your current city's own currency.
Local = your target city's own currency.
One-time cost to get there (you fill these — I won't guess)
Pick where you live now and where you're thinking of moving. Enter your salary or a real offer, and the tool compares the rent, the cost of living, and how long it takes for the move to pay for itself.
By Lin Hai — see how every figure here is sourced on the About page
Before you go
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Questions people actually ask
After tax. The tool uses monthly take-home pay because that is the number you actually live on. If you're comparing offers, make sure both are net, not gross.
Rent plus a single person's routine living costs: groceries, utilities, transport, phone, and a small social/dining allowance. It does not include debt payments, childcare, private school, or flights home.
Because a move is only affordable relative to what you earn. A $2,000 apartment is cheap on a San Francisco salary and impossible on a Kunming salary. The tool hides that judgment until you give it your real number.
It estimates how many months of after-tax savings in the new city it would take to recover the upfront cost of moving (flights, deposits, visa fees, shipping). It's a sanity check, not a prediction.
Those cities had enough cost data to compare, but I could not verify a reliable individual take-home figure. Jingdezhen, for example, runs on small workshops and online sales — there is no typical salary to quote.
No. The calculator is built for one adult. Add schooling, childcare, larger housing, and health insurance if you're moving with others.
City center, unless the city guide specifically says otherwise. Center-city rent is the easiest benchmark to compare across cities, but your actual neighborhood may cost less.
Trust it as a first filter, not a final answer. The numbers come from sourced city guides, but they can't know your commute, your diet, or your social life. Use the comparison to shortlist, then read the guide and talk to people who live there.
Every figure is pulled from this site's sourced city guides — public data (Wise, Numbeo, Livingcost.org, government statistics, local news) cross-checked and footnoted at the foot of each city article. The calculator does no estimating of its own; it just lines up numbers already verified on the city page. If a figure can't be traced to a named source, it isn't shown here.
Most aggregators blend self-reported user submissions into an index. This site instead builds each city from published, footnoted sources and states its limits openly — including where a number is a conservative floor rather than a measurement. Different method, different number. Where the two disagree, trust the source you can name.