Cost-of-Living Comparator
The equivalent salary you need in another city to keep your lifestyle.
Equivalent salary needed in Manchester
£36,471 / year
to maintain your London lifestyle.
Estimate only — not tax advice. Figures are estimates based on publicly available tax rules and may not reflect your full circumstances. See our methodology & sources. Always confirm with an official tax authority or a licensed adviser before making decisions.
Moving cities? The same salary stretches very differently depending on local costs. This comparator shows the equivalent salary you'd need in a target city to maintain your current lifestyle, based on cost-of-living indices.
Pick your current and target city and enter your salary to see the equivalent figure. For cross-country moves it compares purchasing power, not exchange rates — pair it with the take-home calculators to factor in tax too.
What equivalent salary means here
The equivalent salary is the gross figure you would need in the destination city to sustain the same standard of living, holding cost of living constant. It is a starting point, not a target: it deliberately ignores tax, because tax varies by residency status, family situation and region in ways a single ratio cannot capture.
Run the result through the destination country's calculator afterwards. A city that is 10% cheaper in a country that taxes 10 points harder is not the saving it appears to be, and the two effects are easy to conflate when you only look at one of them.
Rent does almost all of the work
Groceries, transport and utilities vary between comparable cities by tens of percent. Rent varies by multiples. In practice a cost-of-living comparison between two large cities is mostly a rent comparison wearing a broader label, which is why the rent index is shown separately here.
This also means the comparison is sensitive to how you live. If you own outright, a move to an expensive city costs you far less than the index implies. If you rent in the centre and have no intention of commuting, it costs you considerably more.
What an index cannot tell you
Indices are averages over a representative basket, and no one buys the basket. They exclude the things that often decide whether a move works: childcare availability, healthcare costs where they are not fully public, the price of visiting family, and how far your money goes in a city whose free and cheap options you have not yet learned.
Use the number to rule options in and out, then price your own life against it: your actual rent bracket, your actual commute, your actual habits. The gap between the index and your own budget is frequently larger than the gap between the two cities.
Before you accept a relocation offer
The number that decides a relocation is not the salary and not the index; it is what is left each month once local tax and local rent have both been applied. Those two are computed separately here for a reason: a country can tax lightly and price its housing brutally, or the reverse, and averaging them into a single figure hides which one you would actually be living with.
Ask the employer for the gross figure, work out the local take-home, subtract a realistic rent for the neighbourhood you would actually live in, and compare that residual against the one you have now. If the residual is flat, the offer is a sideways move dressed as a raise — which is worth knowing before, rather than after, you sign.
Related
Frequently Asked Questions
+How do I compare salaries between cities?
Scale your salary by the ratio of the two cities' cost-of-living indices. If the target city is 20% more expensive, you need roughly 20% more salary to maintain the same standard of living — before accounting for tax differences.
Estimate only — not tax advice. Figures are estimates based on publicly available tax rules and may not reflect your full circumstances. See our methodology & sources (last reviewed June 2026). Always confirm with an official tax authority or a licensed adviser before making decisions.