How to Calculate the Raise You Need to Break Even on a Move

You have an offer in another city. The recruiter asks what number works. You have about four seconds before your answer becomes the anchor for the entire negotiation.

Here's how to arrive at a defensible figure, and why the number most calculators give you is too high.

The method in four steps

Step 1 — Find your real baseline. Not your salary. Your disposable income: take-home pay after all taxes, minus what you actually pay for housing.

Someone earning $100,000 in Houston takes home $79,180 after federal tax and FICA (Texas has no income tax). Subtract $19,800 of rent and the baseline is $59,380. That's the number that has to survive the move.

Step 2 — Price housing in the destination. Use the actual rent for the neighborhood you'd live in, not the metro median. Metro medians blend downtown high-rises with exurbs 40 minutes out. If you know you'll live near the office, look up that submarket.

Step 3 — Adjust for everyday costs, but only the non-housing part. Groceries, utilities, gas, insurance, and services vary by city. That variation applies to your spending money — not to the rent you already accounted for in step 2.

Step 4 — Gross it up for taxes. Work backwards through the destination's federal, state, and local tax to find the salary that yields the disposable income you need.

The mistake that inflates the number

Step 3 is where nearly every free calculator goes wrong, including the one this site used to run.

The standard cost-of-living index — the one where the US average is 100 and San Francisco is 164 — already includes housing as roughly 30% of its weight. In expensive cities, housing is what makes the index high in the first place.

So if you subtract actual rent in step 2, and then apply the full composite index to what's left, you've charged yourself for expensive housing twice.

The effect isn't small. McLean, Virginia has a composite index of 170, driven almost entirely by a $1.43 million median home price. Its actual non-housing costs — groceries, utilities, transport, healthcare — run about 6.5% above the national average. Applying 170 instead of 106.5 to someone's spending money produced a break-even of $169,000 for a Houston-to-McLean move. The correct figure is $142,394.

That's a $27,000 error, and it points in the direction that makes you look unreasonable in a negotiation.

Ask any calculator you're using whether it separates housing from everyday costs. If it doesn't, treat its output as an upper bound.

A worked example

Moving from Houston to Washington DC on $100,000:

• Houston disposable income: $59,380
• DC median rent: $2,800/mo = $33,600/yr
• DC everyday costs: 9.1% above national average; Houston's are 2.2% below
• Required DC disposable income to match: $61,999
• Add rent back: you need $95,599 after tax
• Gross up for federal tax, FICA, and DC's income tax (up to 10.75%): $145,321

So a $100,000 Houston salary needs $145,321 in DC. A 45% raise, and you'd be exactly where you started.

Most people moving that route negotiate for $120,000 and think they won.

What to do with the number

Don't open with it as a demand. Open with it as evidence.

"I've looked at the cost differential in detail — after DC's income tax and housing costs, $145,000 in DC is roughly equivalent to my current $100,000 in Houston. I want to make sure the move works financially, so I'm targeting that range."

This works because it's checkable. You're not claiming to be worth more; you're pointing out that the same compensation costs the company nothing extra in real terms while making the move viable for you. Relocation-heavy employers hear this argument routinely and have budget lines for it.

If they can't move on base, the same number justifies asking for a relocation bonus, a housing stipend for year one, or an accelerated review.

Things this method doesn't capture

Be honest with yourself about the rest:

• State-specific costs. Car insurance in Miami is roughly double Cleveland's. Auto registration in California is brutal. These sit inside the everyday-cost index as averages, but your situation may be worse.
• The one-time cost of moving. Movers, deposits, breaking a lease, and duplicate rent for a month routinely run $5,000-$15,000 cross-country. That's a separate ask, not part of salary.
• Career trajectory. A lower-paying job in a denser market can be worth more over ten years. The break-even calculation is a snapshot, not a forecast.

Run your own route — Chicago to Atlanta, Seattle to Austin, or any of the 1,500+ pairs — and take the number into the conversation.

Your move. Our math.