About LocalSalaryHub

LocalSalaryHub is built and maintained by a small, independent team of software engineers and data analysts who have personally lived the problem this site solves. Several of us have relocated across the country for work, and every one of us hit the same wall: a job offer with a salary number, and no honest answer to what that number actually buys in the target city. A $130,000 software salary in San Francisco and a $95,000 one in Austin can land within a few hundred dollars of each other in real monthly disposable income — but you would never know that from the way most salary sites present their data.

We built the tool we wished existed: one that takes the government's own wage survey, layers on a transparent tax model and a cost-of-living adjustment, and shows you the answer in plain language. No “estimated ranges” scraped from job boards, no paywalled “premium” insights, no data of unknown provenance.

Every base salary figure on this site is sourced directly from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey. OEWS is the same dataset the federal government uses for labor-market analysis and policy decisions. It surveys roughly 1.2 million establishments over a three-year rolling window to produce wage estimates by occupation and metropolitan area. We do not scrape job boards, we do not buy third-party “salary aggregates,” and we do not blend in self-reported user data of unknown quality — every number traces back to a published BLS release that you can verify yourself.

Cost-of-living indices are derived from BLS Regional Price Parities (RPP) and U.S. Census Bureau cost estimates. RPP measures how much the same bundle of goods and services costs across geographic areas, anchored to 100 as the national average — which is exactly the question that matters when you're comparing a job offer in one city against another.

BLS releases OEWS annually, and the published figures typically lag 1–2 years behind the survey collection period. Each page surfaces the underlying survey vintage so the freshness is never hidden.

Most salary websites fall into one of two camps, and neither is satisfying. The first scrapes self-reported numbers from job boards — fast, granular, but noisy, biased toward people who feel like posting, and impossible to audit. The second republishes government data but stops at the headline number, leaving you to do the tax math and cost-of-living adjustment in a spreadsheet. We sit in between: government-grade inputs, but with the modeling work done for you and shown openly.

The practical difference shows up in the kind of question you can actually answer. “What does a registered nurse earn in Phoenix?” any site can answer. “If I move from Pittsburgh to Phoenix for a nursing job, will I come out ahead after taxes and rent?” that's the question we built this site to answer — and the answer is rarely the obvious one. A 12% nominal raise into a city with 20% higher housing costs is a pay cut in disguise, and our comparison tools are designed to surface exactly that kind of trade-off.

The site gets used by a wider range of people than you might expect, and we design for all of them rather than optimizing for one:

• Job seekers negotiating an offer — using city-level median and 75th percentile data to anchor a salary ask, and the take-home calculator to translate a headline number into a monthly budget.
• People weighing a relocation — comparing the same occupation across two or three cities to see whether a raise actually pencil out after housing and taxes. The answer is frequently no.
• Career changers and students — browsing occupation pages to see realistic earnings trajectories and which cities pay best for a given field, without the recruiter spin.
• Journalists, researchers, and policy staff — pulling citable, BLS-traceable wage figures for articles, grant proposals, and briefs. Our citation format names both us and the upstream BLS release.
• Hiring managers and small-business owners — setting compensation bands for a local market without paying for a benchmarking report.

We hear most often from people in the first two groups, and the recurring theme is the same: they had a salary number and needed to know what it meant. That is the gap we exist to fill.

Each salary page runs the headline number through a deterministic take-home pay model that applies 2024 federal tax brackets, the relevant state income tax, Social Security (6.2% up to the annual wage base), and Medicare (1.45%, plus the 0.9% additional Medicare tax for high earners), then adjusts the result by the local cost-of-living index.

We deliberately keep this model simple and fully documented — including exactly what it does not account for (401(k) contributions, dependents, local city taxes, bonuses, equity). An estimate you trust too much is worse than no estimate at all. For the full breakdown of inputs, assumptions, and limitations, see our Methodology page.

LocalSalaryHub is an independent project. We are not a U.S. government agency, we are not affiliated with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we do not speak for them. BLS publishes the underlying wage data as public-domain information; every calculation, interpretation, and presentation on this site is our own. For authoritative government labor statistics, go directly to bls.gov.

Contact & feedback

Found a calculation error, a mislabeled occupation, or a city whose numbers look off? We want to know — corrections that trace back to a pipeline bug are fixed and redeployed, not silently patched. Write to [email protected] and we will investigate against the BLS source.