Is That a Good Salary? 120 City and Salary Answers

People ask “is $X a good salary in [city]?” for the city they live in or are moving to, and most sites answer with a national average. These 120 pages answer it locally: each verdict says where that salary sits among the jobs people actually hold in that metro.

Every verdict is computed, not written. For each city and salary we place the salary inside each tracked occupation’s published BLS wage range (10th to 90th percentile) for that metro, then take the median position across occupations. That median position is the percentile the page reports, and the verdict bands follow our salary percentile calculator: below the 25th percentile is well below typical, 45th to 55th is right at typical, above the 75th is well above typical. Each page also shows the take-home for a single filer after federal tax, FICA and that state’s income tax, and what the metro’s median rent takes out of it.

The 20 metros are the largest by total employment across the occupations we track (the metro audience for this question), with any observed search impressions as a tie-break. Twin cities sharing one BLS metro estimate (Long Beach with Los Angeles, Arlington with Dallas, Oakland with San Francisco, Mesa with Phoenix) are counted once. Boston and Fort Worth have incomplete percentile rows in our dataset and are excluded rather than estimated.