Cost of living by state, 2024

What salary would match your purchasing power?

Multiply your current salary by the destination index divided by your current index. Using this table, $100,000 in California corresponds to about $78,500 in Arkansas before tax: $100,000 × 86.9 ÷ 110.7. The destination’s overall price level is 21.5% lower relative to the origin’s, rather than simply the difference between the two index values.

This is a price-based benchmark, not a take-home salary or a prediction of savings. Use the comparison calculator for your own pair of states, check metro price levels for a closer geographic match, and calculate when monthly savings would cover the cost of moving.

What the cost-of-living index measures

The ranking above uses Regional Price Parities from the Bureau of Economic Analysis — the federal government's official measure of how price levels differ across the country. Each state's figure is expressed relative to a national average of 100. A state at 108 is about 8% more expensive than the US as a whole; a state at 90 is roughly 10% cheaper. Because it draws on a broad basket of goods and services, it captures the everyday cost of living far better than any single price, like a gallon of gas or a loaf of bread, ever could.

The components tell you why a state ranks where it does. Housing — specifically rents — is the largest source of variation, which is why expensive states are almost always expensive because of housing rather than groceries. Goods prices, by contrast, barely move from state to state, since most products are shipped nationally. Utilities and other services fall in between. Sorting by each column shows how differently the states stack up depending on which cost you care about most.

A high cost of living isn't automatically bad, and a low one isn't automatically good. What matters is how prices compare with local wages: a state where pay outpaces prices leaves you better off than a cheaper state where it doesn't. To see that, pair this ranking with median income and the cost-adjusted salary figures elsewhere on the site.