The salary you need to keep the same buying power.
Equivalent salary needed
—
Difference
—
Your breakdown
Updates live as you type| Step | Value |
|---|
Same lifestyle, different price tag
A pay rise to move cities can be a pay cut in disguise. This tool strips away the headline salary and asks the real question: how much do you need to earn in a new place to keep exactly the standard of living you have now? It uses a cost index, a single number that captures how expensive a city is relative to a baseline. You enter your current salary, your current city’s index, and the new city’s index, and it scales your salary by the ratio between them. The logic is a simple proportion: if the new city costs 15 percent more, you need 15 percent more income to buy the same basket of housing, food, transport, and everything else.
The output is an equivalent salary, the figure that holds your buying power steady. Compare it to the offer on the table and you instantly see whether a move makes you better off, worse off, or merely level. Indexes are most reliable when both come from the same source on the same basis, so use one consistent cost-of-living dataset rather than mixing two.
Moving on $80,000 to a costlier city
Suppose you earn $80,000 today in a city you have indexed at 100, the baseline. You are considering a move to a more expensive centre with an index of 115, meaning costs there run 15 percent higher. The calculator scales your salary by 115 divided by 100.
To stand still, you need $92,000 in the new city, $12,000 more than you earn now. If the job offer is $88,000, it looks like an $8,000 rise but is actually a real pay cut of about $3,500 in lifestyle terms. The two bars below put the current and required salaries side by side so the gap is obvious at a glance.
What the index actually captures
Across New Zealand the single biggest driver of the cost gap is housing. Auckland and Queenstown sit well above the national average mostly because rents and house prices are higher, not because groceries cost dramatically more. That has a practical implication: if you own your home outright or have a fixed mortgage, a move to a pricier city hurts your budget far less than the headline index suggests, because the most expensive component barely touches you. A renter, by contrast, feels the full force of the index. So treat the equivalent salary as a starting estimate and adjust it for your own housing situation, which is exactly why the tool lets you type in your own index values rather than locking you to preset cities.
Negotiating a relocation offer
This is where the tool earns its keep. When an employer asks you to move, the equivalent salary is your anchor in the conversation: it is the number that keeps you whole, and anything below it is a request that you fund part of the move yourself. In the example, $92,000 is the floor for staying level, so an offer should clear that before you even consider the upside of the role. It is also worth separating one-off moving costs, shipping, bond, the gap between leases, from the ongoing cost difference the index captures, because the two are negotiated differently. A good relocation package covers the one-off costs and lifts the salary to at least the equivalent figure.
Does this account for income tax differences?
No, and within New Zealand it does not need to, because income tax is national. The same PAYE brackets, the 10.5, 17.5, 30, 33, and 39 percent rates, and the ACC earners' levy apply whether you live in Dunedin or Auckland, so moving cities does not change your tax. The comparison here is purely about living costs. If you were comparing across countries, tax would matter a great deal, but for a domestic move the gross-to-gross index comparison holds, since your take-home rate is unchanged.
Where do I find cost index numbers?
Crowd-sourced cost-of-living sites publish city indexes, and Stats NZ data can inform a rough comparison, though it is published by region rather than as a single tidy index. The crucial discipline is consistency: take both your current and target index from the same source and the same basket, because the ratio is all that matters here, not the absolute numbers. An index of 100 versus 115 gives the same result as 200 versus 230, since both describe a 15 percent difference.