About Should I Move?

Free, fast, and built for people actually thinking about it.

Should I Move? is a free comparison tool for people weighing a move between U.S. cities. It does one thing: it shows you what your salary actually buys you in different places, after taxes and cost of living. Not a glossy ranking. Not a "best cities" listicle. Just the math, applied to your specific salary and your specific job.

Why it exists

Most cost-of-living calculators tell you something you already know — that San Francisco is more expensive than Memphis, that New York is more expensive than Cleveland. What they don't tell you is the thing you actually need to know if you're considering a move: given my salary, my job, and my situation, would I be better or worse off if I moved?

That's a different question, and it requires three things most calculators skip:

• A real estimate of what your specific job pays in the destination city, not just the headline median wage.
• A proper accounting of state and local income tax differences, not just sales tax.
• A purchasing-power comparison that accounts for housing, groceries, transit, healthcare, and the rest — weighted the way they actually appear in a household budget.

Should I Move? does all three. The result is a number that tells you, in plain dollars, what your real take-home equivalent would be in another city. If the number is bigger, you'd come out ahead. If it's smaller, you wouldn't.

How the calculations work

The tool combines several public datasets to produce its comparisons:

• Salary estimates come from BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) data, which publishes occupation-by-metro median wages annually. We surface estimates for 22 broad job categories across 196 U.S. cities.

• Cost of living uses an index where 100 = U.S. national average, weighted across housing (largest factor), groceries, utilities, transportation, healthcare, and miscellaneous goods and services. This data is sourced from BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey and the Council for Community and Economic Research's COL index, with periodic updates.

• Taxes are calculated using current state income tax rates, applicable local income taxes (e.g. New York City and Yonkers), and standard deduction assumptions for a single filer. We don't currently model itemized deductions, retirement contributions, or pre-tax benefits — but the relative comparison between cities holds even without those because they apply roughly equally everywhere.

• Purchasing power is the final output: take-home salary divided by cost-of-living index. It's a single number that lets you compare apples-to-apples across cities.

What it doesn't do

This tool is a starting point, not a final answer. It can't tell you whether you'll like the weather, whether you'll make friends, or whether your career will take a hit by leaving a hub city. It can't tell you that Austin traffic is real, or that Florida insurance is in crisis, or that Pittsburgh has a better food scene than its reputation suggests. Those are the parts you have to figure out yourself, ideally by visiting and reading and talking to people who actually live there.

What the tool can do is keep you from being fooled by either a high-salary trap (where the cost of living eats your raise) or a low-cost-of-living trap (where the salary cut is bigger than the savings). Those traps are common, and they're hard to see without running the actual numbers.

Who's behind it

Should I Move? is built by Jesse Kimmerling, an electrician and software builder who splits his time between a high-paying job site in the U.S. and a small farm in Ecuador. The site started as a personal project after Jesse spent a few too many lunch breaks trying to compare cost-of-living calculators that all gave different answers and none of them really helped him think about his own move.

The blog is written by Jay Kimbol, who is a separate writer with a separate situation — a 34-year-old Chicago IT worker thinking through his own potential move. Jay's posts are personal essays about the experience of using the tool to actually decide something.

Get in touch

Bug reports, data corrections, and partnership inquiries: contact.shouldimoveapp@gmail.com, or use the contact form.

The site is free to use and supported by display advertising. There's an optional Pro tier ($3.99/month) that unlocks multi-city comparisons, full PDF exports, and other power-user features. Free covers most use cases.