Is $100K a Good Salary in 2026? We Ran the Numbers for 40 Cities

Short answer: $100,000 is a good salary almost everywhere in the US — but "good" covers an enormous range. In Memphis it's genuinely comfortable. In San Francisco it's a starter salary that leaves you with less spending money than someone earning $55,000 in Kansas City.

We ran $100,000 through our calculator for all 40 cities we track, using 2026 federal brackets, actual state and local income taxes, and each city's median rent. Below is what's actually left.

What $100K leaves you after taxes and rent

This is annual disposable income — gross salary minus federal tax, state tax, local tax, FICA, and twelve months of median rent. Single filer, no dependents.

City	Total tax	Annual rent	Left over
Memphis, TN	$20,820	$14,400	$64,780
San Antonio, TX	$20,820	$16,560	$62,620
Cleveland, OH	$25,354	$13,200	$61,446
Las Vegas, NV	$20,820	$18,600	$60,580
Houston, TX	$20,820	$19,800	$59,380
Austin, TX	$20,820	$22,800	$56,380
Atlanta, GA	$25,810	$21,000	$53,190
Seattle, WA	$20,820	$26,400	$52,780
Denver, CO	$25,220	$23,400	$51,380
Chicago, IL	$25,770	$24,000	$50,230
Miami, FL	$20,820	$33,600	$45,580
Los Angeles, CA	$26,773	$33,600	$39,627
Washington DC	$27,720	$33,600	$38,680
Boston, MA	$25,820	$38,400	$35,780
San Francisco, CA	$26,773	$43,200	$30,027
New York City, NY	$30,128	$42,000	$27,872

Memphis leaves you with 2.3x what New York does. Same salary, same job, same person.

The surprise: rent matters more than taxes

Everyone fixates on state income tax. Look at the columns again.

Between New York City and Memphis, the tax difference is $9,308 a year. The rent difference is $27,600. Housing is doing three times as much damage to your budget as the tax code.

Miami makes this painfully clear. Florida has no state income tax, so a Miami resident pays exactly the same $20,820 as someone in Houston. But Miami rent runs $33,600 a year against Houston's $19,800. The tax-free paycheck gets eaten alive by the lease. Miami ends up with $45,580 left over — worse than Chicago's Illinois-taxed $50,230 would suggest if you were only looking at tax rates.

This is the single most common mistake I see people make when they plan a move. They pull up a state income tax map, spot the seven no-tax states, and start packing. Then they sign a lease.

But "money left over" isn't the whole story either

Here's the second layer. A dollar of leftover money doesn't buy the same amount of groceries, gas, insurance, and haircuts in every city.

We track a separate non-housing cost index for each city — everyday spending, excluding rent, where the US average is 100. It ranges from 90.4 in Kansas City to 127.1 in San Francisco. Adjusting the leftover money by that index gives you real purchasing power:

• Memphis: $71,187
• Houston: $60,716
• Austin: $59,161
• Chicago: $47,657
• Seattle: $44,094
• Los Angeles: $33,582
• New York City: $24,132
• San Francisco: $23,625

San Francisco is where $100,000 does the least work in America. Not because of California's income tax — that's $7,813 at this salary, less than you'd think. It's the $3,600 median rent stacked on top of everyday costs running 27% above the national average.

Is $100K a good salary for a family?

Everything above assumes one person. Add a partner and kids and the arithmetic changes in two directions at once.

Filing jointly helps — married filers get roughly double the standard deduction and wider brackets, which knocks a few thousand off the federal bill. But childcare doesn't care about your filing status. Full-time daycare runs $15,000-$28,000 per child per year in the metros at the bottom of that table, and that expense appears nowhere in the numbers above.

For a single-income family of four, $100,000 is workable in Memphis, Cleveland, San Antonio, Kansas City, Columbus, and most of the Midwest and inland South. In Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, DC, New York, or the Bay Area, a single $100K income with two kids means real tradeoffs — smaller place, longer commute, or both.

What $100K should be in your target city

If you're moving and want to keep the same standard of living, the question isn't whether $100K is good. It's what $100K becomes.

Starting from $100,000 in Houston:

• Washington DC: you'd need $145,321
• McLean, VA: $142,394
• Chicago: about $108,000
• Nashville: about $96,000

Going the other direction, from $100,000 in New York City:

• Austin: $54,285 matches your current lifestyle
• Philadelphia: $59,698
• Miami: $70,884

That NYC-to-Austin number stops people cold. You could take a $45,000 pay cut moving from Manhattan to Austin and end up with more spending money than you have now. That's not a rounding error — it's the entire reason geographic arbitrage became a thing when remote work went mainstream.

You can run your own numbers with our Houston to Washington DC comparison or New York to Austin, and swap in your actual salary.

So is it a good salary?

Nationally, $100,000 puts a single earner comfortably in the top third of US household incomes. That's real. But the number on your offer letter is an input, not an outcome.

The useful question is what's left after the government and your landlord take their cuts, and what that remainder buys where you live. By that measure $100,000 in Memphis behaves like roughly $180,000 in San Francisco. Same paycheck, wildly different life.

If you're weighing an offer in a new city, don't compare salary to salary. Compare what's left.

Your move. Our math.