About
Built for the week between the offer and the decision
officialsalary.com exists for one recurring situation: you have a number on an offer letter, a city attached to it, and a few days to decide. What you need is not a salary average, a range or a percentile. It is the monthly deposit, itemized, and an honest read on what that deposit buys where you would be living — plus enough explanation to negotiate from.
What we publish
Two things, from one engine. Audits: a paycheck breakdown for a specific salary in a specific U.S. metro or state, computed from the published 2026 federal, FICA, state and city tax rules, with an interactive 401(k) and pre-tax benefits adjustment and a rent-reality check against the local median 1-bedroom. There are 250 of them, and each shows its sources, its assumptions and the date it was last audited. Guides: 13 written pieces on the decisions the audits inform — reading an offer letter, pricing a counter-offer, choosing between cities, the 2026 tax changes — every figure in which comes from the same engine, so the guides and the audits never disagree.
Who makes it
Official Salary is produced by a small independent editorial team with a software engineering and data background, writing under the shared byline OfficialSalary Editorial. The tax engine, the baselines and the guides are maintained by the same people; there is no content farm and no outsourced writing. We are not tax professionals and the site is not tax advice — it is a reproducible calculation from public rules, presented so that you can check it.
Editorial standards
Primary sources only. Every rate, threshold and deduction comes from the authority that sets it: IRS revenue procedures and notices, the Social Security Administration, state departments of revenue, city finance departments. Secondary sources — news articles, other calculators, forums — are never used as the basis for a figure. Each audit lists its sources at the bottom of the page.
One engine, no hand-typed numbers. Audits and guides are generated from the same deterministic calculation. If a figure in a guide disagrees with the audit it cites, the guide is wrong and gets corrected. Rent benchmarks are median 1-bedroom asking rents, rounded to $50, curated from published metro reports and refreshed quarterly; the snapshot date is stated on each audit.
Stated assumptions. Every audit is for a single filer taking the standard deduction, with no dependents, credits, itemized deductions, bonus or equity. We say so on every page rather than pretending to a precision we do not have. Where a state had not yet published its 2026 inflation indexing, the latest published year is used and the audit's source line says so.
Demand-led, not mass-generated. Salary amounts and places are added when people search for them, and every new page passes an automated quality gate — title, description, word count, structured data, and a check that the maths is within plausible bounds — before it is published. We do not publish pages for combinations nobody is asking about.
Corrections
If a rate, threshold or rent figure is wrong, tell us with a link to the primary source. Verified corrections are applied to the baseline data and every affected audit and guide is rebuilt — usually within a day. Corrections that change a published figure are noted on the affected guide with an updated date.
Funding and independence
The site is free to read and is supported by display advertising. Advertisers have no influence on which cities, states or amounts are covered, on any figure shown, or on what the guides say. We do not sell leads, we run no affiliate offers for financial products, and no calculator input ever leaves your browser. See the privacy policy for what is and is not collected.
Contact
Corrections: [email protected]. Requests for a salary or city: [email protected]. Everything else: [email protected].