Published by Salary by Metro · Updated October 14, 2026
Cost of labor and cost of living
What employers pay is a labor-market fact. What those dollars buy is a price fact. A relocation policy has to say which one it is using.
Two official series get used as if they were the same idea. The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program measures what employers pay wage-and-salary workers in an occupation and a place. That is a cost of labor. The Bureau of Economic Analysis regional price parities measure how high or low prices are in that place compared with the United States. That is a cost of living, in the specific sense of an all-items price level. A metro can be expensive to hire in, expensive to live in, both, or neither. The two series do not agree by construction.
What the wage is measuring
The wages on this site are the May 2025 OEWS estimates, released May 15, 2026. BLS describes the survey at https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm and the concepts in the technical notes at https://www.bls.gov/oes/2025/may/oes_tec.htm. Wages are straight-time, gross pay, exclusive of premium pay. They include base rates, cost-of-living allowances, guaranteed pay, hazardous-duty pay, incentive pay, and tips. They exclude overtime pay, shift differentials, nonproduction bonuses, and the employer's cost of benefits. Employment is a count of wage-and-salary jobs at establishments. The self-employed are not in it. A metro wage is the cost of employing people in that occupation inside that metropolitan area. It is not a grocery bill and it is not a rent.
What the price parity is measuring
The price series used here is the all-items regional price parity for 2024, released February 19, 2026. BEA's page for the series is https://www.bea.gov/data/prices-inflation/regional-price-parities-state-and-metro-area. The United States is 100. San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA is 115.613, so BEA estimates prices there at 15.613 percent above the national level. Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is 98.629. Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX is 98.066. One parity covers the whole metropolitan area in the file, not a neighborhood inside it.
To put a wage into national prices, divide the nominal wage by the area's parity and multiply by 100. That is the whole adjustment. To find the salary in a second metro with the same purchasing power as a salary in the first, multiply by the second metro's parity and divide by the first metro's parity. The comparison tool does both. It does not fill in a missing metro parity with 100.
| Metro | Median | Price parity | In national prices |
|---|---|---|---|
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | $74,260 | 115.613 | $64,232 |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | $49,410 | 98.629 | $50,097 |
A wage of $63,351 in Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX has about the same purchasing power as the $74,260 median in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. That is $74,260 times 98.629 divided by 115.613, rounded to the nearest dollar.
Austin and San Francisco, all occupations
The May 2025 all-occupations median in Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX is $56,950. Divide 56,950 by the 2024 all-items parity of 98.066 and multiply by 100. The result is $58,073 in national prices, rounded to the nearest dollar. The all-occupations median in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA is $74,260. Divide 74,260 by 115.613 and multiply by 100. That is $64,232 in national prices. The nominal gap is $74,260 minus $56,950, or $17,310. The gap in national prices is $64,232 minus $58,073, or $6,159. Higher Bay Area prices account for a large share of the all-occupations difference. They do not account for all of it. The remaining gap is still a difference in what employers pay.
The same prices, registered nurses
Run the same division on one occupation and the story changes. In the May 2025 tables, the median annual wage for registered nurses is $186,610 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA, $99,830 in Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX, and $97,890 in Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX. Employment in those three areas is 41,750, 65,910, and 18,920. Divide the Houston median by 98.629 and multiply by 100: $101,218 in national prices. Divide the San Francisco median by 115.613 and multiply by 100: $161,409. Divide the Austin median by 98.066 and multiply by 100: $99,821. After the price adjustment, the San Francisco nurse wage is still far above the Texas wages. The price parity did the job it is built for. It did not turn a labor-market premium into a cost-of-living story.
The other direction is the offer that holds purchasing power constant. A wage of $186,610 in San Francisco has about the same purchasing power as $159,196 in Houston. That is $186,610 times 98.629 divided by 115.613, rounded to the nearest dollar. The published Houston median for registered nurses is $99,830, not $159,196. Matching the Bay Area median's purchasing power would mean paying well above the Houston median. Matching the Houston median would mean paying the local cost of labor and accepting a different purchasing power. Those are different policies.
Which series a relocation rule is using
- A rule that says "pay what this job pays there" is a cost-of-labor rule. The May 2025 OEWS median for the occupation in the destination metro is the published version of that question.
- A rule that says "keep the paycheck buying the same basket" is a price rule. Divide by the origin parity and multiply by the destination parity, using the 2024 all-items figures.
- A rule that treats the entire nominal gap as a cost-of-living allowance is assuming the labor market is the same once prices are removed. The nurse comparison is the case where that assumption fails.
- A state wage is a third geography. The California median for registered nurses is $140,270, below the San Francisco metro median of $186,610. The Texas median is $95,970, near the Houston and Austin metro medians. The state is not a substitute for the metro.
The wages are May 2025. The parities are 2024. Using them together is a comparison method, and each page names the release. BEA did not publish a 2024 all-items metropolitan parity for every area in the wage file. When the parity is missing, the comparison stops. It does not borrow the national index and pretend the area was measured. The guide to comparing pay across metros walks the same arithmetic for the all-occupations case in the table above.
San Francisco and Houston, all occupations · Registered nurses, San Francisco and Austin · Registered nurses, San Francisco and Houston · Comparing pay across metros · San Francisco metro wages · Houston metro wages · Austin metro wages · Registered nurses in San Francisco · Registered nurses in Houston