Figures in this piece are a snapshot taken on 2026-06-30, drawn from 488 active listings across 327 companies. The board has grown since, and medians move with it. For figures recomputed from the live board, see our guide to finding a remote job or the salary data page.
The median advertised salary across the 488 remote roles currently on this board is $125,000. It is a good number. It is also, on its own, close to useless for deciding whether to take a job, because $125,000 is not a quantity of money. It is a claim on housing, food, healthcare, and time in a specific place, and that claim varies by a factor of three or more depending on which place you pick.
This is the difference between nominal pay and real pay. Nominal pay is the figure on the offer letter. Real pay is what that figure buys where you live. Almost every job board in existence shows you the first and leaves you to guess at the second. Here is how to do the math yourself, and why the guessing is more expensive than most people assume.
What Purchasing-Power Adjustment Actually Means
Economists call this purchasing power parity, which sounds more complicated than it is. The idea: build a basket of the things a person actually buys in a month, price that basket in every city you care about, and use the price differences to convert salaries between cities.
We carry cost-of-living data for 30 cities, expressed as an index with New York City set at 100. A city at 50 costs about half what New York costs for a comparable standard of living. A city at 90 costs about ninety percent as much. The index bundles rent, groceries, transport, and everyday services into one number so you can do a single division instead of building a spreadsheet.
Two conversions matter, and they answer different questions.
Conversion one, "what is this offer worth in familiar terms?" Divide the salary by the destination city's index and multiply by 100. That gives you the New York salary that would feel equivalent. Use this when you have an offer and want to know if it is generous.
Conversion two, "what would I need to earn there?" Multiply your current salary by the destination index and divide by 100. That gives you the local salary that would preserve your current standard of living. Use this when you are deciding what to ask for.
Worked Examples: $125,000, Six Ways
Take the board median and move it around. All figures use the cost-of-living index we publish for each city, with New York City at 100.
New York City (index 100)
This is the baseline, so $125,000 is worth $125,000. Monthly gross is $10,417. Typical monthly costs for a single person living comfortably run about $4,000, which means you earn roughly 2.6 months of living expenses for every month you work, before tax. New York state and city income taxes then take a meaningful bite, and the real surplus is smaller than the gross math suggests.
London (index 90)
Almost a lateral move. $125,000 in London has the purchasing power of about $139,000 in New York. Typical monthly costs land near $3,500, so you clear about 3.0 months of expenses per month worked. Anyone who has been told London is dramatically cheaper than New York should look closely at this pair. It is roughly a ten percent difference on the index, not a lifestyle transformation.
Berlin (index 65)
$125,000 in Berlin is equivalent to roughly $192,000 in New York. Monthly costs near $2,200 mean you cover about 4.7 months of expenses per month worked. Flip it: to hold your Berlin standard of living in New York you would need to negotiate a raise of more than fifty percent.
Lisbon (index 52)
$125,000 in Lisbon buys what roughly $240,000 buys in New York. Monthly costs around $1,800 leave you covering about 5.8 months of expenses per month worked. This is the single most common arbitrage in remote work right now, and it is why so many US-benchmarked salaries end up spent in Portugal. Details for the city are on our Lisbon page.
Bangkok (index 35)
$125,000 in Bangkok is equivalent to roughly $357,000 in New York. Monthly costs near $1,100 mean about 9.5 months of expenses covered per month worked. Put differently, a New York employer would have to hand you a staff-engineer-at-a-public-company offer to match what a median remote salary does in Bangkok.
Chiang Mai (index 28)
The far end. $125,000 here is worth about $446,000 in New York terms, with typical monthly costs near $850. You cover more than twelve months of living expenses for every month you work. At that ratio the constraint on your life stops being money and starts being everything else: timezone overlap, visa duration, healthcare, distance from family.
The Part Everyone Gets Wrong
The mistake is not failing to know these ratios. The mistake is comparing two offers on the nominal number when the difference in real terms points the other way.
Consider a concrete, illustrative case. Offer A pays $132,000 but the company runs a location-based pay policy that requires you to live in a designated high-cost metro. Offer B pays $118,000 and is genuinely location-independent. On the nominal number, A wins by $14,000. Run both through a cost-of-living index and B wins by an enormous margin if you take it anywhere below an index of about 89, which is nearly every city we track. People turn down offer B constantly because $132,000 is a bigger number than $118,000, and that is the entire analysis they perform.
The second mistake is treating a location-adjusted salary cut as automatically bad. If a company reduces a $125,000 band to $95,000 for a candidate in a city with an index of 45, the candidate's real pay went up, substantially. Whether the cut is fair is a separate argument about who should capture the surplus. Whether it makes you poorer is a math question, and the answer is often no. Know which conversation you are having before you walk into it.
Why Most Job Boards Cannot Show You This
It is not laziness. It is a data problem with three parts.
Most listings have no salary at all. A board cannot adjust a number it does not have. Salary transparency laws have improved this in some jurisdictions, but a large share of remote listings still ship with the compensation field empty, and boards that scrape aggressively end up with mostly blanks.
Cost-of-living data is a separate dataset that has to be maintained. Job listings and city price indices come from completely different sources on completely different refresh cycles. Joining them means committing to keeping a second dataset current, city by city, forever. Most boards are built to move listings, not to maintain reference data.
The join is a product decision, not just an engineering one. Showing an adjusted number means picking a baseline, defending an index methodology, and accepting that you will be wrong at the margins for any individual person's spending. It is easier to print the raw figure and let the reader sort it out.
We took the other path. Every salary on this board can be viewed against the cost of living in the city you plan to live in, across all 30 cities we track. That is the product. The cost-of-living calculator does the conversion in both directions, the salary explorer shows the distributions by role, and each city page carries its own index alongside the roles that will pay you in it.
The One-Sentence Version
Stop comparing salaries. Start comparing salaries divided by cost of living. The number that matters is not $125,000, it is $125,000 divided by the price of the life you intend to live, and that second number can vary by more than four times across cities on this board without the job changing at all.