Define your target lifestyle
Your salary target
Required salary
$111,000
Gross, single filer
Take-home needed
$7,200/mo
After all taxes
Gap vs $75k median
+$36,000
Above national median
Years to reach goal
6 yr
At 5% annual raises from $85,000
Salary Goals Hub
Reverse-engineer the paycheck
Pick the lifestyle. Pick the city. The engine tells you the salary required to fund it.
Traditional career advice goes: pick a job, see what it pays, adjust your lifestyle. The Salary Goal Planner inverts that — you describe the housing, savings, and lifestyle you actually want, and it back-solves the gross salary required after taxes and cost of living. Then it tells you how many years of compounding raises it takes to get there.
Why this matters
Most people under-target their salary because they don't know what their lifestyle costs to fund. A clear target makes negotiation, promotions, and career changes objective decisions instead of vague aspirations.
Built-in assumptions you can override
- $1,500/mo baseline for essentials (food, transit, utilities) at COL = 100
- Single-filer tax estimates (federal + state/provincial + payroll)
- Bisection solve for back-tax from net to gross
- Compounding raise model for time-to-target