Where $150,000 actually goes

Two offers, the same number on both. Take the one in Houston and $74,044 is left at the end of the year. Take the one in New York and $41,145 is left. The salary is identical; the difference is $32,899 a year, and most people shopping between cities never see it spelled out.

The stage does the spelling out. Move the salary, switch the household, pick a home size, and it rebuilds the whole twenty-city picture. Here is the story it tells.

Federal tax is the same everywhere. That's the point.

A single filer on $150,000 owes $25,067 of federal income tax on the 2025 brackets and $11,475 of Social Security and Medicare . Those two lines are identical in Houston, Portland, and New York. Every dollar of difference between these cities is local.

And local is where the range lives: 24.4% of gross taken in Texas and Tennessee, 33.9% in Portland, Oregon — the highest in the model, ahead of New York. Oregon's top bracket starts at $125,000, and the city sits on two extra payroll levies, the county's preschool tax and the metro's supportive housing tax . New York comes second at 33.5%, state income tax and city income tax stacked on the same wages . Five cities — Houston, Dallas, Austin, Nashville, Miami — take nothing at all on top of the federal bill.

The full spread is $14,277 a year, which is real money and, as it turns out, the smaller of the two gaps.

Rent is the story

Everyday life barely varies. The basket of food, transport, healthcare, clothes, entertainment and personal care costs $23,094 a year for one person in Houston and $25,228 in Seattle — a $2,418 range across twenty cities, once BLS national spending averages are scaled to each state's price level . Nothing happens there.

Everything happens in rent. A one-bedroom at HUD Fair Market Rent is $1,330 a month in Minneapolis and $2,860 in San Francisco, and it takes 14% of a Houston renter's take-home pay against 34% of a San Francisco or New York renter's . Break the $32,899 Houston–New York gap apart and $13,685 is tax, $17,400 is rent, and $1,814 is prices. Rent is over half of it.

Taxes decide who has the biggest paycheck. Rent decides who has the biggest life. Portland is the proof: the most heavily taxed city in the model, but a $1,580 one-bedroom, so it finishes comfortably in the middle.

One more thing the taxes do that averages hide. A raise from $150,000 to $160,000 nets $6,835 in Houston and $5,535 in Portland. Same raise, same job, and Portland takes nearly half of it.

The dial that matters most is the bedroom

Nobody stays in a one-bedroom. Two more rooms cost $8,880 a year in Houston, $13,680 in Seattle, $21,000 in San Diego. In San Francisco the same step leaves a single renter with $22,152 for the entire year — rent alone at 53% of take-home pay — against an everyday basket that costs $25,169. The arithmetic stops working before the bank balance does.

Marriage, by contrast, is nearly a wash. Filing jointly with one earner cuts the federal bill from $25,067 to $15,898, a $9,169 bonus, and then a second adult spends most of it: the two-person basket is about 40% larger than the one-person basket. Houston ends up $397 worse off married, San Francisco $2,687 better.

The gap is smaller in the middle, and wider at the bottom

A dollar left over in Nashville buys more than a dollar left over in Seattle. Adjusted to national-average prices, Seattle drops three places and Denver climbs three, but the top of the table and the bottom of it do not move: Houston still leads and New York still trails .

The slider's low end is where the cities stop being variations on a theme. Rent doesn't care what you earn — the same $33,720 in New York at $60,000 as at $400,000 — so at $80,000 a single one-bedroom renter in New York is $568 short for the year, and at $60,000 they are $13,108 short. In Houston, $60,000 still leaves $10,925. The expensive cities aren't merely a bit worse down there; they are the difference between a budget that balances and one that doesn't.

What this model leaves out

No credits or itemizing, no health premium or retirement saving, and no sales or property taxes — which flatters the no-income-tax states the most. Rent is a voucher-program floor, not a listing price, so the San Francisco and New York shortfalls are conservative. Prices are adjusted by state, not metro, which treats the whole of California alike. What is left over is a margin, not a life: it is the number this model can compute honestly, and the one that turns twenty identical offers into twenty different decisions.

How the model works

Every jurisdiction is written as brackets applied to wages minus a deduction, and every metro as a rent by bedroom count and a price-adjusted everyday basket — the inputs on the stage are the whole model. Federal brackets and deductions come from the IRS and the Tax Foundation , state brackets from the Tax Foundation's 2025 compilation , local wage taxes from its local tax primer , rents from HUD Fair Market Rents , everyday spending from the Consumer Expenditure Survey 2024 scaled by household size and state . Credits, phase-outs and recapture rules are left out on purpose, so that the engine stays the kind you can check line by line.