Where does your income go furthest?
Pick your home county and your income, and every county in the country is re-expressed relative to you: a surplus that says how much further (or less far) your dollar goes than it does at home. This is the mission's core analytic — cost-adjusted income (G2) — turned personal. It's a transparent purchasing-power lens, not a verdict: it shows you where the same dollar stretches further, and it shows how affordable each place actually is right alongside, so a place that looks like great "value" but is out of reach for most can't quietly top the list.
Your home is Los Angeles County, California (RPP 114.749, US = 100, latest 2023). Green counties below are where your income of $75k goes further than it does at home; red counties are where it goes less far. Near-white sits around "about the same as home."
Where your dollar goes further than Los Angeles County (green = further)
What the income box does (and doesn't). Surplus% is income-independent — it's the ratio of your home's cost of living to each county's, and the dollars you earn cancel out of that ratio. So changing your income does not re-order the map; that's by design (your dollar's relative stretch doesn't depend on how many dollars you have). What it does move is equivalent income — what you'd need to earn in each place to keep the standard of living you have at home. Watch that column update as you change your income.
Where your dollar goes furthest
Read the two columns together — that's the whole point. "Your dollar goes further by" is pure purchasing power (cost-adjusted). "Affordability %ile" is how affordable the place actually is for a typical household (price-to-income, oriented so high = more affordable). They can disagree: a place can show a big surplus and a low affordability percentile at the same time — the documented high-earner bias, where a costly metro looks like "good value" on cost-adjusted income while still being out of reach for most. Affordability is shown alongside the rank, never folded into it, precisely so you can catch that.
Honest footnotes. Surplus uses each county's latest RPP vintage and affordability its own latest year, so the two columns may not be from the exact same year (each measure surfaces its most recent figure rather than forcing a single shared year). Counties with no cost-of-living figure aren't ranked low — they read as "no data" (blank on the map) and drop out of the list rather than being dumped to the bottom. As elsewhere, a few county shapes don't match the data (Connecticut's planning regions, a handful of Alaska boroughs) and read blank — the project reports those gaps rather than faking them.
The contract (same as everywhere here). The math on this page lives in the browser — the data vault never baked a "relocation score." This page only re-expresses the ingredient the mart already serves (each county's regional price parity) relative to the home county you pick, so two people with different homes get different maps from the exact same data. Want to weigh several measures at once, or compare two specific places? Try find your happy place or compare two places.