Cost of Living Comparison: All 990 City Pairs Ranked (2026)

Every cost-of-living comparison on this site is computed the same way: BEA Regional Price Parities set the overall price level (U.S. average = 100), U.S. Census ACS supplies median rent, home values, and household incomes for each metro, and each pair page converts any salary between the two cities so you can see what your pay is worth on the other side. The full method, with vintages, is on our methodology page.

Start with the numbers people ask for most: the most compared city pairs, the biggest cost gaps, the cheapest and most expensive metros, or all 990 pairs below. For any two cities and any salary, the cost of living calculator does the conversion directly. And if the real question behind your comparison is whether your pay is fair for your job and city, start with Am I Underpaid? instead: it benchmarks your salary against BLS wage percentiles first, because the cheapest city cannot fix a below-market wage.

The economics in one paragraph: price levels between U.S. metros span roughly 30 percent, but wages for the same job span far more between metros, which is why “move somewhere cheap” so often fails on paper. The pair pages show both sides of that trade: what things cost, and what the median household actually earns there.

How to read a cost of living comparison

Every number on this site rolls up to one scale: the Regional Price Parity (RPP), published annually by the Bureau of Economic Analysis for every metropolitan area. The U.S. average is set to 100, and each metro sits above or below it. Wichita at 88.9 means the metro’s overall price level is 11.1 percent below the national average. San Francisco at 115.6 means 15.6 percent above it. That single scale covers goods, services, and housing (rent) combined, which is what makes cross-metro comparison possible at all.

Two habits keep you from misreading the index:

Divide, never subtract. Index points are not percentages. The gap between San Francisco (115.6) and Wichita (88.9) is not 115.6 minus 88.9 = 26.7 percent; it is 115.6 divided by 88.9 = 1.30, a 30 percent gap. On small differences the error is trivial; on big ones it compounds. Our pair pages and the calculator do the division for you and report true percentage gaps.

Anchor salary conversions to the same division. To keep buying power when moving from a cheaper metro to a pricier one, multiply your salary by the same ratio: $100,000 x (115.6 / 88.9) = $129,981. That is what “equivalent salary” means on every pair page: not a raise, not a cost-of-living adjustment you should demand, just the number that buys the same basket. Anything above it is a real raise; anything below it is a real cut, before taxes are even considered.

One more reading note: an all-items parity blends everything a household buys. Housing gets the largest weight because it is the largest household expense, which is why the housing rows on each pair page (rent and home values, broken out separately) move so much more than the headline index. That is a feature, not an inconsistency, and it is the reason the next two sections exist.

Rent and home prices tell two different stories

Median rent and median home value measure different things, and treating them as one “housing cost” hides the biggest trap in city-to-city comparison. Rent is the current market price of shelter, paid monthly, repriced every lease. A home value is the price of an asset that happens to provide shelter, priced by land scarcity, mortgage rates, and speculation.

The spreads are wildly different. Between Wichita and San Francisco, median rent goes from $960 to $2,419, a 2.5x ratio. Median home values go from $179,500 to $1,380,500, a 7.7x ratio. The rental gap is big; the ownership gap is more than triple it. The same pattern shows up in milder form almost everywhere: Miami’s median rent ($1,657) looks merely above-average, while its median home value ($475,200) carries Florida-level insurance premiums on top.

Three mechanisms drive the divergence:

• Supply lock-in. Most American mortgages are 30-year fixed rates. When rates rise, owners with cheap loans stop selling, supply thins, and prices detach from what local rents would justify.
• Land and regulation. Coastal metros are physically and legally constrained; the constraint prices into land, and land is what appreciates, not the building.
• Carrying costs ride the value. Property taxes and homeowners insurance are assessed on home value, so an expensive house is expensive twice: the payment and the bill that comes with it.

The practical rule: if you rent, weight the rent comparison and the all-items parity, because that is what you will actually pay. If you buy, build a monthly all-in figure: mortgage at current rates on the median value, plus property tax, plus insurance, plus maintenance, and compare that between metros. Two cities can look equal to a renter and be wildly unequal to a buyer. Every pair page lists both medians side by side for exactly this reason.

The take-home axis: gross salary is not salary

A cost of living comparison answers “what will it cost?” A complete moving decision also needs “what will I keep?” The same gross salary nets differently across state lines, and the difference is large enough to flip close comparisons.

The federal income tax and payroll tax (FICA) treat the same salary identically everywhere, so the variable is state and local: nine states levy no broad-based wage income tax, including Texas, Florida, Washington, Nevada, and Tennessee, while others run top rates in the double digits. Some cities add their own wage tax on top: Philadelphia’s resident wage tax alone takes several percent of gross, a cost a suburban commuter with the same salary never sees. There is no state income tax in Texas, which is why an Austin offer can quietly beat a higher-looking Pennsylvania one.

None of that shows up in a price index, because it is not a price: it is a deduction. Our paycheck calculator computes 2026 federal, FICA, and state tax for every state so you can run both sides of a move. The comparison sequence that actually works: convert the salary for cost of living, then convert both salaries to take-home, then compare take-home to local costs. Skipping the middle step is how people accept “equivalent” offers that are five figures worse after tax.

Wages vary more than prices

The 30 percent ceiling on price dispersion is the single most misunderstood number in city comparison, because pay dispersion has no such ceiling. The same occupation routinely pays 50 to 100 percent more from one metro to another, and the raises do not track the costs.

Teaching is the clean example, because the work is standardized. The median teacher in Austin earns $63,270 in a metro priced at 98.1 on the national scale. The median teacher in Seattle earns $101,560 in a metro priced at 111.1. The cost gap is 13 percent. The pay gap is 61 percent. Cost-adjusted, Seattle’s real pay for the same job is about $88,200 in national dollars against Austin’s $67,000, and that is after giving Seattle full credit for its prices. Across the 20 occupations this site tracks, the best-paying metro in real terms is an above-average-cost metro in 19 of 20 cases.

This is why every pair page pairs the price data with wage data, and why the cheapest metros are rarely the richest ones in real terms. It is also why the two tools attached to this hub exist: the salary percentile checker tells you where your pay sits for your exact job and metro, and the cost of living calculator converts between metros once you know the pay is fair. Run them in that order.

Choosing between two cities: the four-step method

1. Check your pay first. Benchmark your salary against your occupation’s percentile ladder in both metros (salary percentile tool). A below-market wage is a bigger leak than any cost gap.
2. Convert for cost of living. Run both salaries through the cost of living calculator to get buying-power-equivalent figures.
3. Convert to take-home. Run both through the paycheck calculator with each state’s 2026 rules. Compare net, not gross.
4. Weight housing by your status. Renter: weight rent and the all-items parity. Buyer: build the all-in monthly ownership cost as described above.

Steps 1 and 3 are the ones people skip, and they are the two that move by the largest amounts.

The pairs people actually compare

Search demand concentrates on a handful of matchups, and they are telling: mid-size Midwest and Texas metros against expensive coastal ones, which is exactly the trade the previous section describes. Milwaukee vs San Diego, El Paso vs San Antonio, and Dallas vs Oklahoma City are three of the most looked-up pairs on the site, and the most compared list below ranks all of them. If your pair is not there, all 990 combinations of the 50 largest metros are indexed below, and the calculator covers any salary between any two of them.

Data, vintages, and honest limits

The price levels are BEA Regional Price Parities (all items), the housing and income medians are U.S. Census ACS, and the occupation wages are BLS OEWS. Each source lags reality by design: parities arrive annually with a revision cycle, ACS medians are survey estimates with margins of error, and OEWS rounds and suppresses small cells. The methodology page lists the exact vintages in use and is updated when the pipeline refreshes.

Three limits worth stating plainly. Metro averages hide neighborhood spread: a metro-level parity cannot tell Sunset Park from Pacific Heights. Household composition is invisible: a two-earner household faces a different effective cost structure than a single earner at the same salary. And quality adjustment is imperfect: the parity baskets try to compare like with like, but a dollar of rent in one metro may buy amenities another does not. None of this changes the ranking of metros; all of it argues for treating a 3 percent gap as a tie and a 30 percent gap as a decision.