Your salary goes furthest in this US city

December 13, 2021

Big city equals big bucks, right? You want a major tech payday, you seek employment in San Francisco. You want to cash your MBA chips, you move to NYC. Right?

In absolute terms, yes. San Francisco has the highest average tech and cross-sector pay in the US. And one in three New Yorkers has a six-figure salary.

But in real terms, the answer is no. When you search for housing, shop for groceries or file your taxes, you may find yourself wishing you’d looked past the digits on your job offer. Adjusted for cost of living, the average tech industry paycheck in San Francisco doesn’t even rank among the top 30 cities in America.

CashNetUSA wants to give you a clear picture of what that starting salary really means. We grabbed city salary data from Payscale and adjusted it using cost-of-living data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. We used the same method for a cross-sector survey and also for a detailed look at the tech, business and banking industries.

Methodology

We pulled lists of metropolitan areas, along with cost of living data, from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, including regional price parity values by metro. Then we pulled city salary data per sector from Payscale and adjusted salaries according to the cost of living data.

You can find a full list of sources here.

Image Credit: DepositPhotos.com.

Cost of Living & Wage Gaps

This scatter graph demonstrates wage disparity when cost of living is factored in for cities of different sizes. It takes all sectors into account. The blue icons indicate the average salary in each city size, while the red icons show the figure adjusted for cost of living.

The cost of living rises in tandem with a city’s population, so your money goes further in small cities. However, big cities usually have higher wages, partly to compensate for the additional costs. This chart shows how the average worker in a city with fewer than 250k inhabitants effectively earns a near $5,000 bonus when their living costs are factored in.

The gap gets smaller and smaller as the cities get bigger. In the biggest cities, the effective average wage is reduced by the high cost of living. As a result, the average adjusted salary in the smallest cities is only $3k less than that in the largest, as opposed to an $8k disparity using unadjusted figures.

Below, find the top 20 cities where your salary will go the furthest.

Image Credit: CashNetUSA.com / Neomam.