A salary that looks generous on an offer letter can shrink quickly after tax, rent and childcare. Moving countries adds another complication: a cheaper basket of groceries does not tell you whether you will have more money left over, or what support you give up in the move.
Shiftscale is a web calculator for comparing two cities as a household, rather than comparing prices in isolation. It tries to answer a practical question: what gross salary in the destination would leave you with a similar standard of living after taxes and costs, and how do benefits change the comparison?
Start with two places and your circumstances
The comparison begins with where you live and where you are considering moving. You enter your current gross salary, then either provide an offer for the destination or leave that field blank to see what salary the calculator estimates you would need. The interface also lets you use city median figures for rent, or enter your own rent in each place.
That distinction matters. A generic cost index cannot know whether you are moving alone, supporting children, renting a studio or paying for a larger home. Shiftscale asks for household details such as partner status, number of children, home size, transport and lifestyle. It also offers fields for income type, share vesting, student loans and an applicable expat tax regime.
Those inputs make this more than a quick city ranking. They also put the burden on the user to describe a plausible household. If your situation does not fit the options, or you do not know which tax regime applies, the result may not represent your circumstances. The calculator is most useful when you can make informed choices about those details and supply realistic rent figures.
From gross pay to the wider package
The central calculation is take-home pay after local tax rules, set against the modeled cost of running your household. Shiftscale says it accounts for tax brackets and other rules, rather than applying a single flat rate. Its comparison then considers non-cash parts of employment, including paid leave, childcare support and healthcare or insurance-related benefits.
The result is presented as several pieces rather than one unexplained score. The example on the site separates gross pay, take-home pay, living costs, what remains and the estimated value of the non-cash package. Additional views cover pay over time, rent or buying, liveability and uncertainty. That makes it easier to see whether a difference comes from tax, housing costs or benefits, instead of treating every outcome as a mysterious city-to-city percentage.
There is an important judgment embedded in putting a value on benefits. The site says it values paid leave using the worker's daily pay, so the calculated value can rise with salary even if the number of leave days does not. It advises comparing leave as a share of pay, not just by its currency value. That is a useful caveat: a monetary estimate makes unlike benefits easier to line up, but it does not make them interchangeable in real life.
Useful for a first pass, not a tax ruling
The developer says calculations run in the browser and that information is not sent anywhere unless a user signs in and saves a comparison. Saving is optional; the basic comparison is presented without an account requirement. The page also says figures include a source, date and confidence level, which can help readers distinguish stronger inputs from estimates.
But the page calls the product a demonstration build. Its tax engine implements specified tax schedules and does not model every allowance, credit or local surcharge. Shiftscale explicitly says it is not tax advice. Those are material limits, not fine print to skip: real outcomes can turn on details that a simplified model leaves out, and a tax estimate should not be treated as a final figure for accepting an offer or filing paperwork.
The calculator is free, and it runs on the web. Its listed city choices cover a set of locations rather than every possible destination. If the city you need is absent, or your finances involve tax circumstances the form cannot express, this comparison will not settle the question. It can still help frame a conversation with an employer or tax professional by showing which parts of the package deserve scrutiny.
Shiftscale is for people weighing an international move or comparing offers who want to look past headline salary and can provide useful household inputs. It is not for anyone who needs authoritative, fully tailored tax advice, or a definitive answer when their city or circumstances are not represented.
What salary do you actually need over there?