About cityparity

Most cost-of-living calculators ask the same handful of questions (rent, groceries, the price of a coffee) and hand you back a number. Useful as far as it goes. The trouble is that for anyone seriously thinking about moving from one country to another, that's roughly half the answer.

The other half is the social safety net, and nobody's putting it in dollars.

If you're considering Seattle to Berlin, US childcare for two kids under four can run $40,000 a year while Berlin caps it at a small fraction. If you're weighing New York against Stockholm, the gap between US private health insurance and the Swedish system is real cash that doesn't leave your bank account, not some abstract "well-being" point. San Francisco to Lisbon? Portugal's statutory 22 paid vacation days versus the US average of 11, plus 120 days of paid parental leave versus FMLA's 12 unpaid weeks. Those are differences an ordinary cost-of-living comparison just ignores.

We built cityparity to put all of that into the same calculation. You enter your salary, family size, and the two cities. The tool returns four views: a headline equivalent salary ("you'd need £85,000 in London to match your $130,000 in NYC"), a take-home breakdown side-by-side after taxes and costs, a quality-of-life score across five weighted dimensions, and a full line-item breakdown where hovering any row reveals the source data and the formula behind it.

The numbers live in static JSON files, one per city, with every figure tied to a citation and a last-updated date. Tax brackets, median rents, childcare costs, vacation statutes, parental leave laws; all of it tagged. We refresh on an annual cadence because most of those values change on that schedule. Currency conversion is live from a free exchange-rate API with a 24-hour cache and a hardcoded fallback when the API is down.

The tool is free and collects nothing personal about you. No signup, no premium tier, no email capture, no tracking cookies. We do run a cookieless analytics counter so we can tell whether anyone's finding it (aggregate numbers only, nothing about you; details on the privacy page). If it's useful, it's useful.

(A note on the name: the question we're trying to answer isn't "where is cheaper." It's "what would I need over there to keep my life roughly equal to here." That's a parity calculation. We named the thing what it does.)