Methodology

Every salary figure published on CityWage is the output of the same formula applied to the same set of government data sources. This page documents each step, so you can check our work and judge whether the number fits your situation.

The formula

We use the 50/30/20 budget rule. Needs are 50% of take-home income, wants 30%, savings 20%. Because the needs figure is what we can compute from objective data, the rest follow from it:

• Needs monthly = housing + food + transport + healthcare + utilities + other necessities
• Wants monthly = needs × 0.6  (30% of total = 60% of the 50% needs figure)
• Savings monthly = needs × 0.4  (20% of total = 40% of the 50% needs figure)
• Required monthly = needs + wants + savings
• Required annual = required monthly × 12

The annual figure is the headline salary on every city page.

Data sources

Each needs category maps to a specific public dataset. We use regional breakdowns where BLS publishes them — Northeast, South, Midwest, West — so a city in Alabama isn't priced against a national utilities average that's dragged up by the Northeast.

• Housing — HUD Fair Market Rents, 2-bedroom benchmark for the metro FMR area.
• Food — BLS Consumer Price Index, food-at-home, regional.
• Transport — BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey, regional transport figures (fuel, insurance, maintenance, depreciation).
• Healthcare — BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey medical-care figures, regional.
• Utilities — BLS CPI for electricity, piped gas, water and sewage, regional.
• Other necessities — BLS CES for apparel, personal care, and education, regional.

Two further figures appear on each page for context, but don't feed the formula:

• Median local salary — BLS Occupational Employment Statistics, metro-area median wage. Used to compute the salary gap.
• National average salary needed — the same formula applied to national-level data, so you can compare like-for-like.

Why 2-bedroom rents

A studio understates what most people actually need, and a 1-bedroom understates for anyone with a partner or child. HUD's 2-bedroom FMR is set at roughly the 40th percentile of metro-area rents — a conservative, reproducible benchmark that doesn't assume roommates and doesn't cherry-pick the cheapest neighborhood.

What "comfortable" means here

Comfortable in CityWage terms is financially stable, not luxurious. The 20% savings rate is enough to build an emergency fund, contribute to retirement, and absorb a job loss without immediately going into debt. The 30% wants category covers discretionary spending — dining out, travel, hobbies — but doesn't assume a lifestyle that requires a second income or trust fund to sustain.

Data freshness and versioning

Underlying BLS and HUD data refreshes weekly. The salary formula is recomputed monthly and written to the database as a new row with an incremented version number — we never overwrite previous figures, so historical data stays queryable. Each city page shows the date its headline figure was last computed.

Known limitations

• Regional CPI lags real-time market shifts, especially in housing.
• BLS OES metro definitions don't always match city boundaries — figures reflect the metro area, not the city proper.
• Figures assume a single household, not two earners splitting costs.
• Taxes and healthcare premiums vary by employer and state — we don't model either directly; our required-income figure is the pre-tax amount needed to generate the implied take-home.

Questions about a specific city's numbers? The about page has more on who we are and why this exists.