State Cost Comparison Tool

A worked budget, line by line

The scenario line is a price ratio, not a bill. It scales the monthly consumption you enter by the destination's 2024 BEA all-items parity divided by the origin's: with hypothetical indices of 100 and 110, $4,000 a month becomes $4,400. That $400 is a broad price-level change, not a forecast that every lease, grocery bill or commute rises by the same amount.

The budget lines use only your quotes. Say the origin costs $1,500 in housing plus $1,000 in other recurring costs: $2,500 a month, or $30,000 a year, against $60,000 of annual income after taxes, leaving $30,000. The destination quotes $1,800 for housing and $1,100 for the rest, so $34,800 a year against $65,000, leaving $30,200. Recurring resources improve by $200, but a $2,000 move makes the first-year change −$1,800.

Decide which one-time amounts belong in that first-year line. A deposit may come back, a down payment becomes equity, and an employer's relocation benefit may have its own tax treatment. The worksheet does not value assets or prepare a tax return, and a blank amount stays unknown rather than being filled with a state median.

How to interpret a difference

Price parity measures a state's consumer price level relative to the United States at 100. Destination divided by origin gives a broad price ratio. Median home value concerns owner-occupied units; two-bedroom gross rent concerns cash-rent households. Those medians are not quotes for one property and are not measures of the same household.

Collect the actual salary offer, prepared taxes, lease or financing terms, utilities, commute and insurance. Enter those amounts in consistent units. Leave an unknown input blank rather than silently assign it zero. Keep deposits and moving charges outside recurring costs.

Census two-bedroom gross rent already includes the tenant-paid utilities the survey counts, while an advertised lease may not: read the contract terms before adding utilities to that benchmark. Where two Census estimates carry 90% margins, a small gap is not automatically a real difference, and the two margins cannot simply be subtracted from one another.

A six-row board cannot rank places to live. It can tell you where a move is likely to pinch first: the rent price level and the two-bedroom median usually separate two states far more than goods prices do. A low price level also says nothing about the tax mix: Arkansas has the lowest 2024 price level of all 51 jurisdictions, yet its state government collected $4,032 per resident in fiscal 2025, against $2,836 in Texas next door. Each state profile breaks those pieces apart.