Enter your city, profession, and salary — see your percentile, take-home pay, and real purchasing power.
Is My Salary Good?
Enter your city, profession, and salary. Get your percentile ranking, take-home pay after tax, and real purchasing power vs your city's cost of living.
It depends entirely on your city. In New York or San Francisco, $100k is average for most professions after high rent and taxes. In cities like Prague, Bangkok, or Medellín it's exceptional — providing top-quartile purchasing power. Use the calculator above to check your specific situation.
How do I know if my salary is above average?
Compare your salary to the median for your profession in your city, adjusted for local cost of living. A salary that looks modest in USD may have excellent purchasing power in a lower cost-of-living city. Our calculator adjusts benchmarks for each city using COLI data.
What percentage of my salary should go to rent?
The standard rule is under 30% of gross income, or under 35% of take-home pay. Above 40% is considered rent-burdened. Our calculator shows your rent-to-income ratio after tax so you can see exactly where you stand.
How is purchasing power calculated?
We calculate after-tax take-home pay, subtract the median 1-bedroom rent for your city, then adjust the remaining disposable income by the city's actual non-rent cost basket (groceries, utilities, transport, healthcare) relative to New York. This avoids double-counting rent and gives a more granular spending-power figure that's comparable across cities worldwide.
About this data
Benchmarks use one of three tiers, shown on each result:
✅ Verified from primary national statistics sources —
⚠️ Estimated from OECD wage ratios vs the US baseline —
🔴 COLI estimate where no salary data exists.