Austin to Nashville on the C2ER ACCRA composite: -7.7% on the headline, -13.0% on housing alone. A $75,000 Austin salary lines up with roughly $69,231 in Nashville after the consumer-price adjustment. State tax stacks on top — sidebar below.
Salary-equivalence math is the same across every cost-of-living comparison: scale by index ratio. For Austin (117) to Nashville (108) that ratio is 0.923. The table below applies it to the three anchor incomes most relocators use as decision points.
| Austin salary | Equivalent in Nashville | Difference |
|---|---|---|
| $50,000 | $46,154 | -$3,846 |
| $75,000 | $69,231 | -$5,769 |
| $150,000 | $138,462 | -$11,538 |
Aggregated indexes are useful for headline comparisons but rarely match an individual household's experience. The five-category breakdown for Austin and Nashville below makes the underlying drivers visible so you can map them against your own line-item budget mix.
| Category | Austin | Nashville | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Housing Rent + median home price | 138 | 120 | -13.0% |
| Groceries Supermarket basket | 95 | 96 | +1.1% |
| Transportation Fuel, transit, parking | 102 | 96 | -5.9% |
| Healthcare Doctor visits, prescriptions | 98 | 95 | -3.1% |
| Utilities Electric, gas, internet | 104 | 98 | -5.8% |
| Composite | 117 | 108 | -7.7% |
A move between Austin, TX and Nashville, TN is small enough on cost-of-living grounds (-8% on the composite index) that the financial decision is usually dominated by non-cost-of-living factors: state tax, salary norms, healthcare networks, school quality, family proximity. The translation to salary terms is straightforward: $75,000 in Austin maps to roughly $69,231 in Nashville, a difference inside the noise band of most job-offer negotiations.
Look at the housing sub-index gap (-13%) as the more interesting figure if you are renting or planning to buy, since housing is the line item that diverges most across U.S. metros. The other categories — groceries, transportation, healthcare, utilities — track regional patterns more than metro-specific ones and contribute less to the gap than housing does in absolute terms.
The cost-of-living index is a pre-tax measure. Add state tax to get the after-tax picture: Texas at 0.00% versus Tennessee at 0.00%. The $75,000 anchor shows $0 owed in Texas versus $0 in Tennessee, a $0 swing on top of the consumer-price gap.
Use the take-home pay calculator to model the after-tax difference at your specific salary and filing status. Federal tax stays constant across the move; only the state piece moves. See the take-home pay calculator or the state-by-state take-home pay article for the precise after-tax number.
The data says no. Composite indexes: Austin 117, Nashville 108. Nashville is roughly 8% less expensive overall, with the housing sub-index doing most of the work and other categories contributing smaller deltas.
Roughly $69,231 per year in Nashville matches what $75,000 buys in Austin, based on the C2ER ACCRA composite ratio of 0.92. The result is pre-tax — add the state-tax delta from the sidebar for the full after-tax comparison.
Housing is the largest line item in any cost-of-living comparison and the one with the most metro-to-metro variance. Austin's housing sub-index sits at 138; Nashville's is 120. That gap reflects rent and home-price differences captured in the C2ER ACCRA quarterly survey. Groceries (Austin 95 vs Nashville 96), transportation (102 vs 96), and utilities (104 vs 98) all contribute, but housing is the dominant factor.
They are tracked separately. The cost-of-living composite measures consumer prices; state income tax is a different axis. Texas and Tennessee can disagree on tax by several thousand dollars per year at typical salaries, and that delta stacks with — not into — the consumer-price gap above.