Methodology
The premise of this site is that you should never have to trust a number — you should be able to check it. Here is exactly how each figure is produced.
The core adjustment
The main comparison converts a nominal income into its value at national prices, using the BEA all-items Regional Price Parity (RPP) for each state. RPP is an index where 100 equals the US national price level.
adjusted_income = nominal_income ÷ (RPP_all_items ÷ 100)
Worked example (reproduce it with a calculator)
California (RPP 110.7): 100,000 ÷ (110.7 ÷ 100) = $90,334 Arkansas (RPP 86.9): 100,000 ÷ (86.9 ÷ 100) = $115,075 Difference: $115,075 − $90,334 = $24,741
A higher RPP means a dollar buys less, so the same income is "worth" less there. A lower RPP means your income stretches further.
The component breakdown
RPP is published broken out by component — all items, housing rents, goods, utilities, and other services. The breakdown table shows each state's index per component and the percentage difference between them, so you can see why one state is more expensive, not just that it is.
On precision
The BEA API returns values to extra decimal places (for example, 110.72), but BEA's own published tables and press releases round to one decimal (110.7). We adopt BEA's published precision so our figures match the official source exactly. The unrounded API values are preserved in our committed raw snapshot as an audit trail.
Housing & income (Census ACS)
Median rent, home value, household income, homeownership rate, and cost-burden figures come from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey 5-year estimates. We use the 5-year (not 1-year) estimates because they are far more reliable at the state level. Values are pulled directly from the Census API by variable ID (for example, B25064_001E for median gross rent) and shown unmodified.
Unemployment (BLS LAUS)
State unemployment rates are the seasonally-adjusted figures from the BLS Local Area Unemployment Statistics program. This is the only monthly dataset on the site, so it is the one figure that changes between our roughly-monthly rebuilds. We show the reference month and flag preliminary values.
Trends over time (FRED)
The historical charts on each state page come from the Federal Reserve's FRED database: the FHFA All-Transactions House Price Index ({ST}STHPI) and the state unemployment rate ({ST}UR), shown as annual points since 2005 alongside the national series. Charts are rendered at build time as plain SVG — no scripts, no tracking — and each carries an accessible data table with the underlying numbers.
On the release lag
RPP is annual and released roughly 14 months after the year it measures. The 2024vintage was released February 2026. We show this lag on every page rather than hiding it — it is a limitation of the underlying official data, shared by every honest source.
What we never do
- We never display a number without a source.
- We never fill a data gap with an estimate — a missing value shows an em dash (—).
- We never call a government API from your browser; all data is fetched at build time.
- We never use a licensed cost-of-living index, so every input here is free and citable.