Remote Work Salary Adjustment Calculator — What Your Offer Is Really Worth
Companies that location-adjust remote pay use a cost index to cut your offer. Enter the headline number and both cities to see what you're actually losing — or gaining — in real purchasing power.
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How Remote Salary Location-Adjustment Actually Works
Most large remote employers set a base salary band against a reference market — often San Francisco, New York, or Seattle — then apply one of three policies when you live somewhere cheaper: no adjustment at all (rare, but real at some fully-distributed companies), a partial haircut that splits the cost difference, or a full peg to your metro's cost index, which can cut a six-figure SF-anchored offer by 15-30% for someone living in a lower-cost city.
The number that actually matters isn't the headline salary, it's the reference-city-equivalent purchasing power after the adjustment. A $120,000 offer with a full cost-of-living haircut moving from San Francisco to Austin might land around $96,000 — still a real number, but a very different one than the headline figure implied during the interview process.
This calculator runs both directions: it shows what your adjusted offer actually pays after the company's stated policy, and separately what that adjusted figure is worth relative to your current salary, so a "pay cut" on paper and a "pay cut" in real terms can be told apart.