How each calculator works.

Salary Comparison by City

We show the wages the BLS publishes for the metro area each city belongs to, then set them against that city’s cost-of-living index to give purchasing power and housing impact. The wage itself is never adjusted — only the purchasing-power view is.

What Should I Earn?

You enter your salary and we place it in the published wage range for that occupation and metro area. Between the five published percentiles the position is interpolated, which the tool says on the page. There is no education or certification premium: we have no data on what either is worth.

Salary After Taxes

We stack the current federal income tax, the appropriate state or provincial brackets, FICA (US) or CPP+EI (Canada), and apply the standard deduction for your filing status.

Layoff Survival

Runway = liquid savings ÷ essential monthly expenses, with severance and unemployment benefits factored in.

Promotion & Raise

We compound your raise over 5 years assuming 3% annual increases on the new base, and show the lifetime delta vs. staying at your current salary.

Freelance Rate

Required hourly = (target income + overhead + tax buffer) ÷ realistic billable hours per year (after holidays, sick days, business development).

Where the scores come from

Several pages show 0–100 scores next to an occupation or a city — purchasing power, salary strength, career opportunity, remote suitability, automation risk, stability. None of those are research findings and none are survey results. They are two kinds of thing:

Arithmetic over the figures on the page. Purchasing power is take-home pay divided by the city’s cost-of-living index. Salary strength is the occupation median measured against a national benchmark. Advancement potential is the spread between the 90th and 25th percentiles of the published wage range. If you can see the inputs, you can reproduce the score.

Editorial rules of thumb. Remote suitability, automation risk and stability are assigned by matching keywords in the job title against a fixed rule table — hands-on trades score low on remote suitability and low on automation risk; data-entry and bookkeeping roles score high on automation risk. That is a reasonable general view and it is applied consistently, but it is a judgement about a category of work, not a measurement of your job. Treat those three as a conversation starter, not a finding.