Salary equivalent calculator
Compare your current city and target city using after-tax income, housing, essentials, and savings goals.
Open calculator →North America relocation tools
Salary, rent, and cost of living calculators for North America
Living Cost Laboratory helps renters, remote workers, students, and job changers estimate whether a salary is enough before moving. Compare take-home pay, rent burden, monthly expenses, and lifestyle trade-offs with simple transparent calculators.
Start with three questions
- What salary would keep my lifestyle similar in another city?
- How much rent can I afford after taxes?
- Is a specific salary comfortable, manageable, or tight?
Rent-to-income calculator
Estimate whether a rent amount is reasonable based on gross income and a simple after-tax view.
Open calculator →City comparison pages
Use city-specific pages to evaluate rent, transportation, taxes, and monthly savings before moving.
Austin vs Seattle →What this site is designed to verify
This English MVP is intentionally small. Instead of launching hundreds of near-duplicate city pages, the first release focuses on a few high-intent search patterns: salary affordability, city-to-city relocation math, and rent burden. The goal is to see which intent produces impressions, indexed pages, clicks, and useful engagement before expanding into a larger North America content set.
The calculators use editable assumptions because cost of living is personal. A $100,000 salary can feel very different depending on rent, debt, household size, health insurance, car dependency, tax withholding, and whether the person is moving alone or with family. A transparent model is more useful than a single universal answer.
For search quality, every future city page should add distinct local context, realistic assumptions, comparison tables, FAQs, and a calculator module. This avoids the thin-template problem that often hurts programmatic SEO projects.
Current MVP pages
FAQ
What is Living Cost Laboratory?
It is a collection of educational calculators for comparing salary, rent, city costs, and relocation trade-offs in North America.
Are these calculators financial advice?
No. They provide educational estimates only and are not financial, tax, legal, immigration, or relocation advice.
Can I compare U.S. and Canadian cities?
The MVP starts with U.S. salary and rent workflows. U.S. versus Canada comparisons can be added after the core calculators are stable.
Why do inputs use editable assumptions?
Rent, taxes, insurance, transportation, and lifestyle vary widely. Editable assumptions make the calculations transparent.