I've always found these cost of living calculators to be enormously useless. I've used them for every city move I've made, and the results have never been close

I've always found these cost of living calculators to be enormously useless. I've used them for every city move I've made, and the results have never been close to reality. This is particularly true for housing, since there's more to finding a place to live than the median price of a rental. The "median" apartment in SF is likely a studio in the Tenderloin (e.g., stabby stabby!). It doesn't take into account what is being rented, nor where it is, nor transportation, nor any other crucial factors. The metric "average price of a rental apartment" is pretty much as useless as can be. Take this for example, I moved from Seattle to SF not too long ago: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=moving+from+San+Fransisco+to+Seattle+salary+%24100%2C000 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=moving+from+San+Fransis... According to Wolfram, housing in Seattle is about half of SF. Except, if you actually shop in both markets, you will find that in Seattle you'll find a big 1BR in a nice part of town, with a doorman, elevators, probably nice shared facilities like gyms, hot tubs, BBQs, and saunas. For 2x that in SF you'll find a 1BR in a crappy part of town, not close to mass transit, built at the turn of the century, comes with a book full of asbestos and lead-paint warnings, and forget about the gym, you probably won't even have your own damn washing machine in the flat. So yeah, apples to oranges really. Cost of living calculators can go burn in hell.