Deciding whether to move cities is one of the most consequential financial decisions you can make. Yet most people rely on gut feeling, anecdotes from friends, or listicles that rank cities by "quality of life" without telling you what that means for your salary and your priorities.
This guide lays out a framework for making that decision with data.
The three dimensions that matter
Not all cities are equal across all dimensions. The right city for you depends on what you're optimising for:
1. Savings potential How much of your salary can you actually keep? This depends on the ratio of your expected earnings to the cost of living — not just rent, but overall lifestyle costs.
2. Career opportunity Not every city has an equally deep job market. Tech-heavy cities (San Francisco, Berlin, Amsterdam) offer stronger career ladders for certain roles. Financial hubs (London, New York, Zurich) dominate others.
3. Financial pressure Even a well-paying city can be financially stressful if rent consumes 45%+ of your income. Lower-pressure cities give you breathing room — even if absolute salaries are lower.
How to use CityVerdict
Enter your current city and salary. Select your priority. You'll get:
- A move verdict: Stay, Consider moving, or Strong move opportunity
- Best-fit alternatives ranked by your priority
- A 1-year and 3-year financial projection of staying vs moving
- Trade-off analysis for each alternative: what you gain, what you lose
The goal isn't to tell you where to move. It's to surface the trade-offs clearly so you can make the decision.
A note on the data
CityVerdict uses official salary and income data from national statistics agencies — ONS, Destatis, INE, INSEE, CBS, Statistics Canada, ABS, and the OECD Income Distribution Database. Cost and rent indices are sourced from the same datasets used by SpendVerdict.
Opportunity and lifestyle indices are heuristic scores, clearly labelled as such. We don't pretend they're statistical measures. See our methodology page for full details.
The bottom line
Moving cities is a financial decision first. The data should inform it — not make it for you. CityVerdict gives you the numbers. You make the call.