About costofplace

Most "cost of living" tools rank cities. We don't care about cities — we care about whether your specific household, with your specific spending, can actually live somewhere without shredding its savings. So we built a map.

What the map shows

A single viability score per geography — state, county, or census tract, depending on how far you've zoomed in. Green means your inputs are comfortably supportable there. Red means they aren't. The score is a deterministic function of your inputs and the underlying data; nothing is hidden.

Data sources

• Rent & housing: HUD Fair Market Rents and Census ACS 5-year housing cost tables.
• Healthcare: ACA Marketplace silver-plan benchmarks by rating area.
• State & local taxes: Tax Foundation state-level rates plus county-level adjustments.
• Climate risk: First Street Foundation flood, fire, heat, and wind composite (where licensable) — otherwise FEMA NRI as a fallback.

Everything is rebuilt monthly. Sources and exact vintages are listed in each blog post when we publish a refresh.

Methodology, in one paragraph

For a given household (annual spend, headcount, ages) we estimate the locally-priced cost of a comparable lifestyle in each geography, divide by spend, and squash the result into a 0–100 viability score. The math is a pure function — it lives in src/components/map/viability.ts and runs in your browser. No server. No tracking.

Limitations

This is a planning aid, not financial advice. We don't model schools, commute times, individual lease terms, ESPP vesting cliffs, or whether your friends live there. A green polygon means the numbers work, not that you'll be happy.

Who built this

A solo builder who got tired of arguing about Austin versus Raleigh on a spreadsheet. Reach out via the email on the GitHub readme if you find a bug.