About MoveMath

MoveMath answers one question for every US metro: what will my household’s life cost here versus there — after taxes — and what salary do I need to move?

Most cost-of-living tools multiply a salary by a price index built from crowdsourced or undisclosed data. They ignore income taxes, which differ by thousands of dollars between states and cities, and they ignore who lives in your home — the bedrooms you need, your children’s childcare, how much you drive. MoveMath prices those things directly, for your household, using only official sources: the Bureau of Economic Analysis, HUD, the Census Bureau, the Department of Labor, USDA, the Energy Information Administration, the IRS and state revenue departments.

What’s here

• 7 calculators, led by the cost of living comparison and salary-needed calculator.
• Profiles of all 387 metro areas in the 50 states and DC, 51 state pages, and 398 comparisons for the most common moves in Census migration data.
• A methodology page documenting every source, vintage, formula and limitation.

Who we are

MoveMath is written and maintained by the MoveMath Editorial Team. We are a small editorial team, not a financial adviser, lender or real-estate company, and we don’t sell leads. We don’t claim personal testing or local expertise we don’t have: every figure on the site is computed from published government data by code we test, and every page shows where its numbers come from.

MoveMath shares its 2026 income-tax engine with our sister site TakeHome, which documents each state’s tax rules in detail.

How we’re funded

The site is free to use and will be supported by display advertising. Advertisers have no influence over our data or methods.

Questions or corrections: contact us.