Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers

I suspect the cost of living data for Austin trails reality by some significant margin. The sources don&#x27;t indicate the age of the data, but even if it&#x27;s only a couple of years old, it&#x27;s going to be wrong by enough to be a factor.<p>I have lived in Austin for a couple of years, and also lived here (and owned a house here) about 8 years ago. The cost of homes here has gone up <i>tremendously</i> since then. I was shopping for a house a few months ago, and was simply unable to buy one; those in my price range wouldn&#x27;t accept my offer because it wasn&#x27;t an all-cash offer (despite being $5000 or more over the asking price). Investors paying cash are buying aggressively here, driving up prices. Rental rates have risen at an even faster pace.<p>Certainly, it&#x27;s cheaper here than in Silicon Valley. Five years ago, I was paying $2145 a month in rent for a house a couple of blocks from downtown Mountain View. Today I&#x27;m paying $1690 a month for a house quite far outside of downtown Austin and on the east side; renting in downtown is not an option, even at $2000+ a month. Apartments are somewhat cheaper, and buying a house is still notably cheaper than Silicon Valley, but the gap has been closing rapidly.<p>In short, Austin has grown incredibly fast in recent years, and the real estate market hasn&#x27;t been able to absorb that growth in anything like a reasonable manner. So much so that I&#x27;d be shocked if the graphs in this article still reflect reality for Austin.

If more employers understood the value of distributed teams, this wouldn&#x27;t even need to be an issue. You could live exactly where you wanted to live.<p>Want a 700 sq ft studio in Manhattan for $3k&#x2F;month? Great. Want a 2000 sq ft ranch home next to a river out in the country with your own garden? Done. Want to just save as much as you can, with a cheap apartment in a cheap town outside a cheap city? You got it. Maybe you even want that $600k suburban McMansion to raise your family in. That&#x27;s not a problem either.<p>Most readers are probably going to prefer urban environments, but that&#x27;s because the demographic of software developers is somewhat self-selecting. When it&#x27;s nearly impossible to get a job as a developer <i>not</i> in an urban environment, people who don&#x27;t like urban cities are going to self-select out of the profession. The high achievers among them will instead choose to become doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc. -- careers that aren&#x27;t so location restricted, despite ironically being far less amenable to remote work. I had some <i>really</i> smart and hard-working friends growing up, and all chose to go into careers of that nature simply because they didn&#x27;t want to be forced to move to a big city.

I remember once meeting an old high school friend in NYC. He was hanging out at one of those non-descript but unfathomably loud bars. Some of his coworkers stopped by. The conversation switched to the car one of them had bought. A Lexus SC430 convertible. He was complaining about how he never got to get out of The City and drive it enough. They were all super-sharp CS graduates working for one of the most successful hedge funds in the world.<p>My point with this story is that if you are making way above the median salary in NYC ($200k+ range at the time, this was 10 years ago) - the world is just different. You are making enough money to enjoy one of the top cities in the world. With the $125k-$140k salaries some software developers report making, they are barely getting to &quot;enjoy&quot; living in NYC. Finance has distorted the baseline of what it means to be successful in NYC. I mean, my school friends&#x27; coworkers were 2-3 yrs out of Harvard and talking about the travails of $80k car ownership like it was an Accord.<p>Software salaries outside of Fintech and top-tier companies like Google and Facebook and a handful of others in globally attractive cities are the equivalent of middle class in the burbs. You&#x27;re doing OK but you&#x27;re not going to be relatively &#x27;really doing well&#x27;. In a city like NYC, there are more than enough free events to overwhelm anyone. However, in San Jose, what do you do? Hang out on the Palo Alto main drag?<p>Check out the size of the dogs being walked near Central Park. Where do these people live?!

Weirdly Atlanta is not on the list, but this is why I&#x27;m probably never moving to SF. Yes, all the cool jobs are there, but for what price?<p>GA tech is releasing very high quality engineers and the startup scene here is great (Mailchimp and many others), and you live in a frikin mansion 10 minutes commute to work (if you live in Alpharetta). Tons of technical meetups and both thriving startup scene and established enterprise presence.<p>West coast based companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon et al keep trying to offer me jobs in SF like it&#x27;s obvious that this is where I would want to move, I really don&#x27;t understand why they don&#x27;t open offices in Alpharetta. Dead cheap office space, great talent pool, and if you ask me - awesome weather. and they will have to pay me 50% less than what they would in SF, and I won&#x27;t have to switch my 3,500 square feet house (which is 10-20 minute drive to a myriad of tech companies) with a 2 bedroom and an hour commute to work

Decisions based on average (a&#x2F;k&#x2F;a &quot;mean&quot;) salaries, however, are only relying on a small part of the picture. Personally I&#x27;d like to see standard deviations accounted for in here. I have the feeling that it is easier to make 1.5x to 2x these &quot;averages&quot; in some cities than in others, especially for people with experience.

This is something a lot of us have instinctively felt for a long time, hence all job action in places like Austin, Denver, Raleigh, etc. And I&#x27;ve worked in SF, Denver and Raleigh, NC enough to know the differences. If I can make 6 figures in both SF and Raleigh, the cost of living and quality of life are insanely better in Raleigh. I own a condo, a car and have tons of discretionary income. For the same type of work in the bay area, I&#x27;d have to contend with ridiculous rents, ridiculous taxes, longish commutes and increased expenses on food&#x2F;misc items. These increases are not commensurate with the increase in salary that usually goes along with moving to the bay area. My actual income when adjusted for these factors is better than friends who make ~200k in SF.

I&#x27;ve lived in several of these cities briefly (Seattle, Austin), and a long-term (Raleigh, NYC).<p>If you can put up with the car culture - which you have to if you want to live outside of NYC or Chicago - Raleigh is a great city. Very low cost of living, a burgeoning downtown night-life and cultural scene, and very warm, likable people. Austin has a much better downtown, but I&#x27;d be concerned about traffic moving there, which is not a problem (yet) for Raleigh.

Except cities aren&#x27;t really fungible. If you like big cities, then NYC may be the best place to live regardless of salary. If you like the outdoors, then maybe another city. If you are raising a family, then maybe you want to be in a quieter area with good schools. If you want to be in a tech hub, then you should be in Silicon Valley. And if you have a spouse, that is all adjusted by their needs and the industry they work in.<p>On a software developer&#x27;s salary, you&#x27;ll get by regardless of what city you live in, so you should be choosing the city which suits your personality and your stage of life.

Anecdote: The &quot;average&quot; salary reported for New York is very close to the entry-level starting salary for college graduates at most large (names you&#x27;ve heard of) tech employers in NYC. Companies routinely check what each other are doing and adjust entry-level pay packages yearly to compensate for competition, inflation, demand, etc. which makes data from each successive previous year not as relevant for someone interested in making a decision now. I do not think it is hard to imagine that more senior employees that are currently not interested in another job do not have any incentive to report pay to these sites, particularly if their pay is higher than what the site is reporting. (i.e. selection bias)<p>Related -- I believe the distinction between &quot;engineer&quot; vs &quot;developer&quot; being discussed here lately is less relevant than people think. Many people choose their own title when reporting information on sites used as sources in the article and companies may choose to post job listings using a completely different title. Even if the data could be traced back to an actual official title at each company, a large well-paying (or low-paying) company in a particular city could skew the entire number based upon whether they randomly refer to their employees as developers, programmers, or engineers internally. Similarly, a social trend to prefer &quot;engineer&quot; could skew all the anonymous reporting on these sites but actually had no bearing whatsoever in how salaries are determined. Given the noise in the data, I don&#x27;t see how distinctions can be drawn from the outside.

I think averaged adjustments for cost of living are senseless as this is quite individual.<p>Let&#x27;s take me as an example: I manage to live modestly but well on around 1000 CHF (1050 USD) in Zurich while making around 6400 CHF (6700 USD) in net-salary. I am a junior software engineer hacking on Python in a SMB.<p>(Full disclosure: My company is hiring; feel free to reach out to me at iwang{at}fastmail.net. Also, my experiences working in Switzerland can be found here: &quot;Eight reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT&quot; <a href="http://goo.gl/EIX4UX" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;goo.gl&#x2F;EIX4UX</a>)

I’m curious how Europe’s tech hubs (specifically London, Paris, and Berlin) compare to U.S. cities.<p>I suspect Berlin would compare quite favorably, despite the relatively high German tax rate. I moved there 18 months ago and currently pay €500 ($565) for a one-bedroom apartment in a nice part of town (Prenzlauer Berg). In San Francisco, I paid 5X that for a studio apartment in Hayes Valley.

Would be nice to see more SE cities in here like Atlanta, Miami&#x2F;Ft Lauderdale, Tampa&#x2F;Orlando, Jacksonville, Charlotte, NOLA, etc..<p><i>edit</i> the software market is pretty hot up in DC&#x2F;North Virginia too<p>Salary&#x2F;COL is typically high in the bigger SE metros from what I&#x27;ve observed growing up in the region.

Suggested title change: &quot;American Cities with ...&quot;. Not everyone lives in Murica.

Is that itemizing the CA taxes or just taking the standard deduction? The rule of thumb in CA is if you make more than $100,000, your state taxes are larger than the standard deduction.

When the final analysis results in 5-10k difference, I&#x27;m just going to live where I want

This is happening more and more. WTF web devs?<p>Me: Where are the charts themselves?<p>Me: Oh, I&#x27;m using noscript.<p>Me: Displaying PNGs now requires javascript.

Has anyone done something similar for Europe or other parts of the world?

I still feel like Chicago developers miss out on being exposed to the culture of SV or Seattle. I&#x27;ve worked and lived in Chicago all of my professional career, and one of the intangible non-money aspects to this field to consider is how you grow as an engineer. If you love writing software, this isn&#x27;t a very good place to work compared to SV&#x2F;Seattle. There just isn&#x27;t a very large or strong culture of software development here like there is in those cities. Also the tech scene here feels super small and tight knit. If you work for a startup here its hard to interview or talk to people outside your company without somebody knowing somebody from XYZ company who can get the inside digs on you. That&#x27;s been fine for me in my career, because I think I&#x27;m a decent performer, but it makes things awkward when you want to move on.

One thing I have noticed during a recent job search - I used the cost of living calculator from bankrate.com[1], relocation from city A to city B from wolframalpha [2] and the salary information available on websites like glassdoor, indeed and salary.com to get an estimate of a par salary at different locations for a particular position. In these websites, I noticed that indeed.com has extremely optimistic estimates of the salaries for most positions when compared to glassdoor or salary.com, so much so that I stopped using data from indeed.com e.g. here are the salaries for a software engineer in Chicago, IL<p>- glassdoor.com ( avg $74,426 ) [3]<p>- salary.com ( median $62,257 ) [4]<p>- indeed.com ( avg $114,000 ) [5]<p>Even when verified by converting the par salaries from 2 different locations using bankrate or wolframalpha the indeed estimates were quite high. Since, the author used data from glassdoor and indeed, I wonder how accurate the analysis is considering the underlying data from indeed isn&#x27;t necessarily accurate.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-living-calculator.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bankrate.com&#x2F;calculators&#x2F;savings&#x2F;moving-cost-of-l...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=relocating+from+seattle+to+miami+with+a+salary+of+$35000" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolframalpha.com&#x2F;input&#x2F;?i=relocating+from+seattle...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/chicago-software-engineer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,7_IM167_KO8,25.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.com&#x2F;Salaries&#x2F;chicago-software-engineer-...</a><p>[4] <a href="http://www1.salary.com/IL/Chicago/Software-Developer-I-salary.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www1.salary.com&#x2F;IL&#x2F;Chicago&#x2F;Software-Developer-I-salar...</a><p>[5] <a href="http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Software-Engineer-l-Chicago,-IL.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indeed.com&#x2F;salary&#x2F;q-Software-Engineer-l-Chicago,-...</a>

Nice. A slightly more useful analysis would be for a fixed, user defined, salary. Showing results for Glassdoor is pretty cool. But I don&#x27;t care what other people make. I care about what I make and what I think I can make in particular cities. All the figures are pretty low for a senior engineer which limits it&#x27;s use.<p>Also, the chart that takes taxes into account is really cool. Super useful. People who move from Seattle to California know that cost of living is a big difference, but they don&#x27;t properly account for state income tax! They often try to, but get the math wrong.

Nice! Would like to see similar rating for Europe. From my experience, Prague could be the leader.

They should&#x27;ve added Washington DC and Boston to this list.

Very nice work! I&#x27;d love to see it expanded and &quot;opened up&quot; in the form of a Google Spreadsheet or something else where people can plug more cities into it.

Sadly there&#x27;s no data for Utah. Salt Lake City has an amazing ratio between software developer salaries and cost of living. 6 figure salaries are the norm for non-junior developers. According to trulia, housing is about half the price (450k vs 950k).<p>It&#x27;s hardly a technical wasteland either, historically or economically. Utah was the 3rd or 4th node on what became the internet. Alan Kay began research on what he would later call &quot;object oriented programming&quot; at the University of Utah.<p>In the startup world Utah is number 7 when it comes to venture funding <a href="http://siliconslopes.com/blog/2015/01/19/utah-ranks-7th-nationally-in-vc-funding-for-2014/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;siliconslopes.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;19&#x2F;utah-ranks-7th-nati...</a>. Personally, I&#x27;ve spent time working for a google venture funded Utah based startup.<p>I&#x27;ve had multiple offers to relocate to areas like Sydney, Las Vegas, Seattle and they&#x27;ve never been able to beat Utah&#x27;s salary to cost of living ratio.<p>Also, having the world&#x27;s best snowboarding and mountain biking is a perk for some of us.<p>Of course the one thing that beats working for a Utah company and living in Utah is working remotely for Bay Area company and living in Utah. Win&#x2F;Win.

For those that wish to own a home, make sure to consider property taxes.<p>Texas has no income tax but very high property taxes at ~3% per year of home value. So a 350k house will add ~$900&#x2F;month on top of a mortgage.<p>SV has a much lower rate but you&#x27;ll probably pay more than Texas in absolute terms because 350k houses do not exist there.<p>Colorado is a nice balance. Home prices in between SV and Texas, but one of the lowest property tax rates in the country.

Can someone explain the numbers,<p>I see averages of $100K&#x2F;year for developers and then keep hearing of freelancers raking $150-$200&#x2F;hour ($300K&#x2F;year).<p>How can this be ?

Is this for the city proper, or does it take an average of the suburbs, too?<p>I live in a suburb of Portland, (Hillsboro) and I live a perfectly decent life making about $44,000 a year before taxes. I&#x27;m also young and don&#x27;t have kids, but I would happily commute half an hour into Portland if I had a job in the city. It&#x27;s not that bad of a drive as long as it isn&#x27;t during rush hour.

FYI, something about this page is bringing my iPhone 5S to a crawl. Safari routinely stops responding for 10s at a time. Is it the graphs?

Cost of Living is just one factor to consider, and everybody has different priorities.<p>I discount the CoL &quot;bonus&quot; because of the generally poorer environment with respect to culture, public institutions like libraries and parks, and educational opportunities. I grew up and lived in the south for most of my life. With precious few exceptions I found it to be mainly a canvas upon which the bigoted (race, gender, sex orientation) and extreme anti-government types painted most of the landscape. You could give me 100% of my current salary&#x2F;year tax-free in a high-yield&#x2F;low-risk investment account and I wouldn&#x27;t move back to one of those places. I may have considered it before I had kids, but not now.

Would love to see Boston, Boulder, and Los Angeles added to the list for comparison

How about Chiang Mai or other city with large digital nomad community?

The distinction between &quot;software developer&quot; and &quot;software engineer&quot; seems like a spurious one. Almost invariably I&#x27;ve seen the two terms used as synonyms.

Selfishly, I&#x27;m glad to see that Nashville isn&#x27;t on this list! Though I&#x27;d be interested to see how it compares.<p>There seem to be a lot of cities that offer good talent with a great cost of living - sort of cities poised for a breakout. I wonder what kind of critical mass you have to have in other areas - i.e. concentration of tech talent, infrastructure, educational resources, etc... to really be a great tech community?

It is nice a cost of living discussion that looks at total discretionary earnings rather than useless metrics like percentage of income spent on rent+food.

I&#x27;m curious if the salaries include stocks and other compensation - my stocks are a large portion of my compensation package, and I work for a major company, not a startup. It makes me wonder if this might skew more in favor of west coast, where (I think?) those compensation schemes are more common - as where I&#x27;m at, those numbers all seem really low compared to what most people I know make.

How accurate is glassdoor? If I look at my city, for my position, inside my own company it seems highly inaccurate. Either that or I&#x27;m paid half of what everyone else makes, which seems unlikely. According to this site indeed seems probably even more inflated.<p>Then I can&#x27;t figure out what the incentive to inflate your salary would be when reporting it to glassdoor unless companies are doing it themselves.

I am a bit surprised to see the salaries for Denver. For anyone leaving&#x2F;working in Denver area is that on par with what you see?<p>For some reason i was expecting Denver to be a bit higher on that list in terms of salaries.

Most of the cost is from rent or housing. If you lower that cost by living more minimally, San Jose may still be the best place overall in terms of discretionary spending.

Would love to see Philadelphia included in such a calculation.

what&#x27;s the difference between engineer &amp; developer ?

What would &quot;Extra Discretionary&quot; look like for SF?

I look at these numbers as curve-fitting. If you want to rationalize why you stay in Austin or North Carolina or someplace, this is great data to do it with.

In Seattle, taking a 45 minute train ride can be the difference in 300K or more for buying a house. I wonder if other cities are similar?

A shame Detroit was not included. Salaries are similar to Chicago and CoL is much lower, although probably not as low as Raleigh.

an international version of this would be good

I wish I could just plug cities into this thing and it spits out the same data. Would be an incredibly useful tool

Looking at SF would be very interesting since being in the bay area I have the choice of both SJ and SF

No mention of Pittsburgh! We have a fairly low cost-of-living and decent salaries for tech.

Things like schools, healthcare, crimerates and public transport should be added.

Be interesting to compare this to some Indian cities.

Very in depth, nice work OP!

Texas personal income tax is zero. That&#x27;s a huge advantage. But then you have to live in Texas.

I would guess that New York is getting underrated, because in finance, once you get a serious, adult job, you&#x27;re usually called something other than software engineer. &quot;Vice President&quot; is the typical title for someone of my age (31) even if you&#x27;re a full-time programmer with no reports. Only at Managing Director (30-35 if you&#x27;re lucky or good, 40-45 more typically) are you culturally expected to start having reports. I&#x27;ve heard of full-time engineers getting &quot;Portfolio Manager&quot;, even if the job has little to do with managing a portfolio.<p>So, I&#x27;d guess that there are a lot of high-paying full-time software jobs in New York (and Chicago) where the title is something like &quot;Vice President, Technology&quot; or &quot;Quant Trader&quot;.