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WorkWingman — Cost of Living & Income Tax (Plain Language)

Two numbers that make salary offers actually comparable across cities: what things cost there (gas, groceries, rent) and what you'd actually take home after taxes, in that city.

Heads up: this is a helpful estimate, not tax advice. Nobody's real tax situation fits neatly into a formula — deductions, credits, a 401(k), a side gig, all of it changes the real number. Use this to compare two offers side by side, not to fill out your actual tax return.

Cost of living — where the numbers come from

The idea: a $120,000 salary in a cheap city and a $120,000 salary in an expensive city are not the same offer. We wanted to show gas prices, grocery prices, and rent trends for a job's city — but only using numbers that are free, legal, and official, the same rule we already followed for layoff history.

What we looked at and what we picked:

  1. Gas prices — from the U.S. government (EIA). There's no public way to ask GasBuddy for prices programmatically, but the U.S. Energy Information Administration publishes official weekly gas prices for free, and anyone can get a free key. That's what WorkWingman uses.

  2. Rent and grocery trends — from the U.S. government (BLS). The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the Consumer Price Index — the same index you hear about on the news for inflation — broken out by "rent" and "food at home" categories, also free with a free key.

  3. MIT's Living Wage Calculator — we looked, but it says no. Their website explicitly says: don't scrape our data, don't pull it out programmatically. If you want it, you have to ask them to license it to you. So we don't use it.

  4. A city-specific paid service (Numbeo) — wired up, but turned off by default. Numbeo has the most precise, city-by-city cost-of-living numbers around, but it costs real money every month ($260+), and nobody's bought a subscription for this project. WorkWingman has the wiring ready to use it — the moment someone adds a paid key to the settings, it turns on automatically. Until then, it quietly does nothing, and the free sources above cover what they can.

The honest catch: the free government sources don't publish numbers for every single city — they publish by broad region (five big fuel regions for gas, four big regions of the country for rent/groceries). So two different cities in the same region will show the same gas price and the same rent trend. It's a real, useful signal — just not "this exact city, this exact block" precision. Get a Numbeo subscription and that upgrades automatically.

Income tax — a real, working calculator, right on your machine

The idea: if you're comparing "$120K in Texas" against "$110K in California," you want to know what you'd actually keep after taxes — not just the sticker number.

How this works: unlike the cost-of-living piece, this doesn't call any outside service at all. WorkWingman has its own built-in tax calculator, using the real, published 2026 tax rules:

  • Federal tax brackets — the same ones the IRS publishes every year.
  • Social Security and Medicare (the taxes that come out of every paycheck no matter where you live).
  • State income tax for every single US state — including the 9 states that don't tax income at all (Texas, Florida, and others), states with one flat rate for everyone, and states with the more complicated sliding-scale brackets (like California and New York).
  • A handful of well-known city taxes — New York City, Philadelphia, and several Ohio cities (Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and more) all charge their own local income tax on top of state tax, so those are built in too.

Because it's all just math running on your own machine, it works instantly, works offline, and never sends your salary information anywhere.

What you get back: your take-home pay, broken into what went to federal tax, FICA, state tax, and local tax — plus your "effective rate" (the real average cut across your whole paycheck) and your "marginal rate" (the rate on your very next dollar earned, which is usually higher).

Comparing two cities side by side

The idea: put a salary + city on one side and a salary + city on the other, and see which one actually wins once take-home pay and cost of living both count.

WorkWingman shows the raw dollar difference in take-home pay between the two, and — whenever enough cost-of-living data is available for both cities — a second number that adjusts for how much pricier or cheaper one city is. If one side is missing cost-of-living data entirely, that adjusted number is simply left blank rather than guessed at.

This comparison tool is built so it can plug straight into "what's my current job/salary" once that feature exists elsewhere in the app — you'll be able to compare a new offer against your actual current situation, not just two hypothetical cities.

A couple of honest caveats

  • Cost-of-living numbers are regional, not block-by-block precise (see above).
  • The tax calculator assumes the simplest situation (single filer, no special deductions/credits). It's built to be extended to other filing statuses later.
  • Local city taxes only cover a handful of well-known cities today — not all 700+ towns in Ohio alone that have their own tax. Adding more is straightforward; it just hasn't been done for every city yet.