Economy

Where Is the Best City to Live, Based on Salaries and Cost of Living?

Paychecks stretch the furthest in smaller cities for most workers, but techies continue to do best in larger, more expensive cities.

An encampment of homeless people in Honolulu, Hawaii. Once adjusted for housing and other costs of living, salaries in Honolulu rank lowest of all metros.Audrey McAvoy/AP

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By Richard Florida

September 5, 2019 at 7:00 AM EDT

Say you’re graduating from college and looking for the best place to start your career, or you are part of an established professional couple looking for a city in which to start your family: Where is the best place for you to live—a leading tech hub like the Bay Area or Boston, a superstar city like New York, or a less-established “rise of the rest” city like Pittsburgh?

A new analysis by Jed Kolko, chief economist at the labor market and jobs site Indeed, breaks down the data, identifying the cities and metro areas where salaries stretch the furthest and workers and families have the most money left over. To do so, he compares salary data from Indeed’s job postings to cost of living data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (as we know, differences in living costs are basically all about housing). Kolko’s data cover all 185 United States metros with 250,000 people or more.

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