In my experience, most companies will severely lowball on big relocations and cost of living adjustments. You could be living in the boondocks on $100k a year,

In my experience, most companies will severely lowball on big relocations and cost of living adjustments. You could be living in the boondocks on $100k a year, where the cost of living is next to nothing. And then you find a roughly equivalent job in NYC, where the cost of living is easily 2X or 3X your current situation. Will the firm in NYC double or treble your salary? Extremely unlikely. Most will simply anchor to your existing salary, with perhaps a very miniscule adjustment for COL. In these situations, it might make sense to volunteer the first number in the negotiation, and to go high with it. Don't mention your current salary. Just talk about how the cost of living is a big adjustment (be precise about your multiplier, citing a data source), relocation is a big adjustment, etc., so accordingly, $X sounds reasonable. (Where X = the first number you mention; you do not make reference to your starting point before arriving at X. The hiring manager or HR person usually won't work backwards and reverse-engineer your starting point, but rather, will treat X as the anchor. The mere fact of having a rationale leading up to X makes X seem credible). The other thing I'd say is not to make X a wildly ballsy figure, or to pull it out of thin air. You should have a very realistic reasoning for having arrived at X; it shouldn't be complete bullshit. Giving a number that is wildly off the top end of the pay scale for a position is a sign of naivete, which is often a signal that you're not actually qualified for the position (or that you're overqualified, in which case, why are you applying for this position?). Your anchor X should be somewhere at the high end of what your research tells you is a realistic range for the job in question.