This Career Brief will help you to analyze the worth of your salary offer(s) in relation to the city and state where you would be making that salary. Two jobs with similar responsibilities, titles, and salaries may not be similar at all if one is located in a high cost city while the other is based in an inexpensive city. To compare salary offers, you need to access several websites below.

Most of these sites use a Salary Calculator where you enter your salary offer and the city where you would be making that salary and also enter the city to which you would like to compare the first one. Keep in mind that these comparisons often use prices of groceries, housing, utilities, transportation, health care, clothing, and entertainment.

These calculators usually ask you to compare your current salary in your current city to another city. Since you will be comparing two possible job offers in two different cities, here is how you would use the Salary Calculator:

Enter the city and state from Offer A and then enter the dollar amount from Offer A. Next enter the city and state from Offer B. The calculator will produce for you the equivalent salary for Offer B's city and state. Here is an example:
Enter in the calculator - Offer A: Austin, Texas; your job offer is $50,000
Enter in the calculator - Offer B: San Jose, California
The calculator will return the dollar amount of $76,263. Here is the explanation:

In other words, the cost of living in San Jose, California is 52.5% higher than that of Austin, Texas. A salary of $50,000 in Austin, Texas has the same buying power that a salary of $76,263 has in San Jose, California.

In addition, if you currently have one offer, you can still use the Salary Calculator. Enter the one offer you have into the Calculator's first city and salary and then use either your hometown or Pittsburgh, PA as the second city. This will help you to analyze your offer with a city you are already familiar.

You may want to access several salary calculators because sources can vary, along with the accuracy of the calculator. Also, you may want to discuss the cost of living index and salaries with your Carnegie Mellon Career Consultant.

Salary Calculator Web Sites:

Data Masters
http://www.datamasters.com/cgi-bin/col.pl

Monster Salary Calculator (and cost of living for individual cities)
http://www.monstermoving.com/Find_A_Place/Calculators/SalaryCalc/

Career Journal from the Wall Street Journal
http://www.careerjournal.com/salaries/calculator/index.html

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