How does your purchasing power actually change? Here's the real breakdown — after taxes, after cost of living.
What the numbers mean
A $75,000 salary in San Francisco gives you the equivalent of $35,954 in purchasing power after accounting for state income taxes (7.0%) and the local cost of living. The same salary in Austin gives you $61,983 — a difference of +72%.
Median rent in Austin runs about $1,700/month — roughly $1,700/month less than San Francisco's $3,400. That's $20,400/year back in your pocket before you factor in anything else.
No state income tax in Austin. On a $75,000 salary, that's roughly $5,250/year you keep that you wouldn't in San Francisco.
These numbers use a cost-of-living index where 100 = national average. San Francisco's index of 194 means it costs 194% of the national average to maintain the same lifestyle. Austin's is 121.
The Bay Area exodus, with numbers
This is the move that defined a generation of the tech industry — San Francisco to Austin, somewhere around 2020 or 2021. Plenty of people made it work. Plenty of people moved back. The thing that decides which group you're in is whether you can keep your San Francisco salary, because the math swings dramatically on that one variable.
If you keep your SF salary, this is one of the best moves in the country. San Francisco's cost of living index is around 270; Austin's is 121. That's not a typo — SF is more than twice as expensive as Austin on housing-weighted measures. A $150,000 SF salary, kept in a remote arrangement and spent in Austin, has the purchasing power of roughly a $330,000 SF salary. Throw in California's 9.3% income tax (or 10.3% above $375k) versus Texas's zero, and the gap gets wider. This is the version of the move that worked for early-2020 tech workers who got grandfathered remote, kept their TC, and moved before Austin housing caught up.
If your salary adjusts to Austin levels, the math is different. Tech compensation in Austin is real but lower than SF, often by 20–30% for the same role. A senior engineer making $230k base in SF might be offered $175k in Austin for the same job at the same company. The cost-of-living adjustment that follows you absorbs much of the gain — you're still better off in Austin, but by a smaller margin than the headline number suggests, maybe 15–25% real purchasing power gain instead of 100%+.
What you actually trade. SF gives you walkable density, weather that almost never goes above 75° or below 45°, public transit that mostly works, and the highest concentration of senior tech talent on Earth. Austin gives you bigger apartments, no state income tax, more hours of sunshine, a thriving live-music scene, and a tech industry that's now real but still less deep than SF's. If you're a senior IC who never wants to job-hop again and doesn't care about being near a hub, Austin is fine. If you might want to switch companies in the next three years and you're in a niche specialty, leaving SF could cost you optionality that's hard to put a dollar value on.
Housing reality check. A 1BR in a decent Austin neighborhood is $1,650–$1,900. A 1BR in a decent SF neighborhood is $3,200–$3,800. That's $1,500–$2,000 a month in pure rent savings, or $18,000–$24,000 a year. Buying is more dramatic: the median Austin home is around $550,000; the median SF home is around $1.4 million. If your goal is ever to own property, Austin offers a path that SF closed off for most people in the late 2010s.
The summer problem. SF doesn't really have summer. Austin has six months of it. July and August in Austin are 95°-plus for stretches, with heat indexes that make outdoor activity hard from late morning through early evening. People moving from SF's microclimate often dramatically underestimate how much this restructures daily life. It also runs your AC bill to $200+ a month for a one-bedroom in peak summer — not a budget-breaker, but a real line item that wasn't on your SF utilities.
The traffic. Austin's road infrastructure has not kept up with population growth. Driving across the city at rush hour can take 45 minutes for distances that look like 15 minutes on a map. SF expats used to walking or transit-ing everywhere often experience this as a bigger lifestyle hit than the COL index can capture, because it eats into the time you'd otherwise spend on the things that made the move worthwhile.
The math on SF to Austin works. The question is which version of the math applies to you, and whether the things you'd lose in San Francisco are things you actually used.
Run your actual numbers
The comparison above uses $75,000 as a baseline. Your real result depends on your salary, your job type, and whether your employer adjusts pay for location. The tool below lets you enter your specific situation.