About cityparity

cityparity is a cost-of-living and equivalent-salary calculator that prices taxes, childcare, healthcare, vacation and parental leave for professionals moving between countries. It was founded in 2026 in Seattle, Washington, by Skyler Bissell, and it covers 181 cities in 60 countries. The calculator is free and runs in the browser with no account; the one paid product is a $49 relocation report called the Decision Pack.

The headline it produces is a salary. Type in $150,000 in New York and London as the destination, and it reports that you would need about £96,000 there to keep the same net cash once UK tax, rent, the NHS and 20 days of statutory paid leave on top of bank holidays are all priced in. Most cost-of-living tools stop at rent and groceries. For a household with kids, daycare and healthcare alone can move that number by tens of thousands, so cityparity puts them in the same calculation as the tax brackets.

(A note on the name. The question the tool answers is "what would I need over there to keep my life roughly equal to here." That is a parity calculation, so we named the thing what it does.)

What cityparity does

The free calculator

You enter a salary, a household (partner, kids in daycare, renting or buying) and two cities; the calculator returns four views: Overview, Take-home, Score and Breakdown. The Breakdown view shows the source and the formula behind every line, so you can argue with any number instead of trusting a percentage.

The Safety-Net Index

The Safety-Net Index prices childcare and full healthcare, after child benefit, for the same household at $150,000 across the covered cities, and publishes the table as a CSV under CC BY 4.0. It is the page to quote when the question is which countries pay families back and by how much.

Country rankings and hubs

Seven ranking pages order the covered countries by take-home pay, vacation days, parental leave, childcare cost, child benefit, employer cost and right to work, and six country hubs collect one country's cities and rules in one place. Each row names its country, so a single line can be lifted and cited on its own.

City-pair comparison pages

214 published city-pair pages (Seattle vs Oslo, New York vs Berlin, and so on) run the engine on a fixed scenario and print the result as static HTML. They are the share and deep-link surface: send one to the partner who has to agree to the move.

The Decision Pack

The Decision Pack is a one-time $49 report for one city pair ($79 for up to three destinations) with eight sections: the break-even salary, where the money goes, what would change the answer, a salary range to discuss, moving costs before the first paycheck, how reliable each figure is, a recruiter one-pager and the sources. If it does not help you decide, you get the full amount back with no deadline and keep the report.

The MCP server and the embed widget

The MCP server at mcp.cityparity.com exposes six tools (compare_cities, list_cities, get_city_summary, rank_cities, get_safety_net, get_inbound_tax_regime) that Claude, Cursor and other agents can call, free and with no API key. The embed widget puts the same engine on your own blog with one line of HTML.

What makes cityparity different

It solves for a salary instead of returning a percentage

Numbeo and Expatistan compare a basket of prices and tell you that city B is 18% cheaper. cityparity computes net cash in city A, then searches for the gross salary in city B that leaves the same net cash after that country's full tax and cost stack. The output is a number you can put in front of a recruiter, and the method is on the methodology page.

It prices the social safety net in cash

Childcare net of subsidy, healthcare out of pocket, statutory vacation and paid parental leave all enter the calculation as money, alongside rent. A price index leaves every one of those lines out, and for a family of four they are usually larger than the whole grocery gap. The cityparity vs Numbeo post walks a Seattle to Oslo example where that flips the verdict.

Tax is computed from each country's real brackets

Income tax and payroll come from the tax authority (IRS, HMRC, Belastingdienst and their peers), run as progressive brackets on your salary with two-earner filing handled per country, and inbound expat regimes such as the Dutch 30% ruling and Spain's Beckham Law are modelled where they apply. Levels.fyi is the best map of gross tech pay; cityparity vs Levels.fyi explains why the gross figure is where the comparison starts rather than where it ends.

Every figure names its source and its date

Each city's data is a JSON file in which every numeric field carries a citation and a last-updated date, and the Breakdown view shows both on the line itself. Crowdsourced price data is used for groceries and discretionary spending only, and those lines are labelled as crowdsourced instead of being passed off as official figures.

It is still here, and it is open to agents

Teleport Cities, the other tool that tried to compare whole lives across borders, went dark in 2024 after its acquisition. cityparity is independent, publishes its computed outputs under CC BY 4.0, and has a free MCP server, so an AI assistant can run the comparison directly.

Who uses cityparity

The core reader is a working professional aged 25 to 45 in tech or knowledge work, with a partner and often kids, holding a real offer (or a persistent daydream) that pulls between a high-salary country with a thin safety net and a lower-salary country with a thick one. Financially literate, allergic to hype, wants one defensible number plus the deltas that matter to their own household. Around that core:

• People moving from the US to Europe (Seattle to Berlin, New York to Amsterdam, San Francisco to Lisbon) who need the take-home and the daycare bill in one figure.
• Expats weighing an inbound tax regime: the Dutch 30% ruling, Spain's Beckham Law, Italy's impatriati regime, Denmark's researcher scheme.
• Parents pricing childcare across borders, where two kids in daycare can swing the answer by $30,000 a year or more.
• Remote workers on US pay living in Europe, checking what that salary keeps once local tax and healthcare apply.
• HR and compensation teams, and the AI assistants they use, calling the MCP server to sanity-check a relocation package.
• Writers and newsletter authors who drop the embed widget into a post about moving abroad.

Two readers, quoted from the homepage:

"An essential tool for the mobile and ambitious. Like speaking with a friend who made the move, and that friend happens to be in wealth management and a CPA at the same time. Hard to get lowballed or delusional when you know the math."

"This is a really amazing tool for international people. Used it for an upcoming move I have and it gave some great perspective. Thank you!"

The team behind cityparity

Skyler Bissell founded cityparity in 2026 in Seattle, Washington, and runs it as founder. The first version existed to settle one comparison, Seattle against Oslo, after every calculator he tried returned a rent-and-groceries percentage and ignored the childcare and healthcare lines that decided the move. He still writes the data corrections, the blog and the replies to the contact form himself.

cityparity is headquartered in Seattle and operates as a one-person company. The data is deepest for the United States and Western Europe, which is also where the blog concentrates.

How cityparity works

You type in a salary, a household and two cities, and the engine looks up each city's JSON file: tax brackets, payroll rates, median rents, daycare fees and subsidies, healthcare costs, transit fares, vacation and parental-leave statute. Every numeric field in those files carries a source and a last-updated date. The engine is a pure function with no server behind it; it runs in your browser, so nothing you type is sent anywhere and there is no account to create. The methodology page goes through the solver step by step.

Data is refreshed on an annual cadence, because tax brackets, benefit rates and statutory leave change on that schedule, with corrections applied as they arrive. Currency conversion is live, cached for 24 hours in the browser, with built-in fallback rates for when the exchange-rate API is down. If a value looks wrong, the "Spot something off?" flag on any figure and the contact page both land in the same review queue, and every correction decision is logged with its source.

The calculator collects nothing personal about you. There is an optional email list for data updates, and joining it is never required to use anything here. A cookieless analytics counter tells us whether anyone is finding the site (aggregate numbers only, nothing about you; details on the privacy page). If it's useful, it's useful.

Key facts

Frequently asked questions

What is cityparity?

cityparity is a cost-of-living and equivalent-salary calculator that prices taxes, childcare, healthcare, vacation and parental leave for professionals moving between countries. It was founded in 2026 in Seattle by Skyler Bissell and covers 181 cities in 60 countries.

How much does cityparity cost?

The cityparity calculator, rankings, country hubs, comparison pages, MCP server and embed widget are free, with no account. The Decision Pack is a one-time purchase: $49 for one destination or $79 for up to three, and if it does not help you decide you get the full amount back with no deadline and keep the report.

How is cityparity different from Numbeo?

Numbeo compares a crowdsourced basket of prices and returns a percentage. cityparity solves for the gross salary you would need in the second city to keep the same net cash, after each country's income tax and payroll, childcare net of subsidy, healthcare out of pocket and the cash value of vacation and parental leave, sourced from tax authorities and statute. For a family those lines are usually larger than the whole grocery gap.

Who founded cityparity?

Skyler Bissell founded cityparity in 2026 in Seattle, Washington, and runs it as founder. The first version was built to settle one comparison, Seattle against Oslo, and he still writes the data corrections and the blog himself.

What does cityparity cover?

cityparity offers a free calculator with four views, the Safety-Net Index, 7 country ranking pages, 6 country hubs, 214 published city-pair comparison pages, 101 blog posts, the $49 Decision Pack report, a free MCP server with six tools, and a free embed widget. The data covers 181 cities in 60 countries.

Do I need an account, and is my data stored?

No. The cityparity calculator runs in your browser with no signup, and the salary and household you type in never leave it. The only data cityparity keeps is a cookieless aggregate visit count, an optional email list you can join for data updates, and, if you buy a Decision Pack, the pseudonymous order record described on the privacy page.