The cost of living: How Pittsburgh stacks up with other cities
Transferees looking to move to Pittsburgh for a job are probably wondering how expensive it is to live in the City of Bridges and how far their salaries will go to cover it.
The Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., has a handy Family Budget Calculator that can help out.
It’s designed to help employees decide if they’re making the right move financially, something that a reader wanted the Post-Gazette’s business staff to help figure out, asking: “How can I transfer from another city to Pittsburgh and earn enough money to make a living?”
The policy institute’s calculator compares every county in the nation based on major categories of expenses, including housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, taxes and “other necessities.”
“We looked at what it costs to live across the country … what it takes to make ends meet,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the nonprofit research institute.
“It’s a pretty basic budget. You would want to add other things, like savings for college and retirement. But you can look at it and compare what it costs to get by.”
The calculator — available at www.epi.org/resources/budget — uses a variety of government data from 2017 to estimate expenses, such as government health exchange premiums.
Housing costs are based on average rental rates rather than home mortgages.
It allows users to adjust for single households, couples and households with one to four children.
According to the site, it costs a family of four $79,486 a year to live modestly in Allegheny County, roughly the same as in Philadelphia County on the other side of the state at $84,901.
But the way people divide up their paychecks in those two regions is different.
The biggest discrepancies are for transportation (Residents in Allegheny County will have to budget an average of $1,111 a month vs. $879 in Philadelphia County) and for health care (Philadelphia County residents will pay $1,100 a month vs. $810 Allegheny).
The site also shows that it’s more expensive to live in Allegheny County than in Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County, where a family of four can get by on $70,679 a year.
Allegheny County is cheaper than living in Fort Lauderdale’s Broward County at $86,896 or Los Angeles County, which sets residents back $92,295 a year.
Overall, the gap in expenses between regions tends to be muted because the results were averaged across an entire county.
“Within a county, there could be a lot of variation in costs in terms of which neighborhoods people choose to live in,” Ms. Gould said.
An apartment in Sewickley might be more expensive than one in Shaler, for example, and someone commuting by bus from Dormont might spend less than a Hampton resident driving to Bridgeville.
The Seattle-based software company PayScale Inc. has another cost-of-living calculator — available at www.payscale.com/costof-living-calculator — that drills down to the city level.
According to the site, the cost of living in Pittsburgh is 1 percent lower than the national average, 2 percent lower than Cleveland, 15 percent lower than Philadelphia, 31 percent lower than Los Angeles, the same as Harrisburg and 21 percent higher than Knoxville, Tenn.
Of course, cost of living isn’t the only factor to consider when deciding where to live. A region’s cultural vitality and the quality of its schools and hospitals could be just as important, for example.
And people who don’t already have a job offer will want to consider the health of the labor market before resettling, Ms. Gould said.
“Sometimes people say, ‘Oh, Tennessee is so inexpensive,’ but it was at a time when unemployment was high,” she said.
“You’ll want to find out … how likely it is you’re going to get a job.”
In order to ensure the biggest paycheck, it helps to know the going pay rates for a particular area. The PayScale tool can help there, too.
The calculator gives the average, low and high salaries based on the city and particular job.
Let’s say you’re interested in an office manager’s position at a Pittsburgh law firm.
According to PayScale, the average annual salary is $48,553, ranging from a low of $39,000 to a high of $61,000.