To preserve the same standard of living you have today in Dallas on $75,000, you would need $82,783 in Austin. That is a +10.4% composite shift; the line-item breakdown below shows where the gap actually concentrates. Source: C2ER ACCRA, BLS CPI weights.
The salary you would need in Austin to match your Dallas purchasing power is your current salary times the index ratio 1.104. The three rows below show the result at the entry-level, mid-career, and senior anchor points most job posts negotiate around.
| Dallas salary | Equivalent in Austin | Difference |
|---|---|---|
| $50,000 | $55,189 | +$5,189 |
| $75,000 | $82,783 | +$7,783 |
| $150,000 | $165,566 | +$15,566 |
Aggregated indexes are useful for headline comparisons but rarely match an individual household's experience. The five-category breakdown for Dallas and Austin below makes the underlying drivers visible so you can map them against your own line-item budget mix.
| Category | Dallas | Austin | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Housing Rent + median home price | 116 | 138 | +19.0% |
| Groceries Supermarket basket | 96 | 95 | -1.0% |
| Transportation Fuel, transit, parking | 99 | 102 | +3.0% |
| Healthcare Doctor visits, prescriptions | 99 | 98 | -1.0% |
| Utilities Electric, gas, internet | 102 | 104 | +2.0% |
| Composite | 106 | 117 | +10.4% |
The cost-of-living gap between Dallas, TX and Austin, TX is small on the composite measure (+10%) but the line-item picture is more textured. Housing alone moves by about +19%, which is larger than the composite because non-housing categories — groceries, healthcare, utilities — tend to move together across U.S. metros and partially offset each other in the composite.
The right interpretation: do not let the small composite number lead you to assume the two cities are interchangeable. Your specific budget mix will determine the actual change in monthly outlays. A high-savings, low-housing household will see a small net change. A housing-heavy household will see something closer to the housing sub-index gap. Sketch your three biggest line items before treating this move as a financial non-event.
Income tax is a separate axis from the cost-of-living index, and Texas and Texas can disagree on it sharply. 0.00% versus 0.00% on the top-marginal or flat state rate translates to $0 versus $0 on a $75,000 salary, a $0 delta that stacks with the consumer-price story.
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.
Yes — by about 10% on the composite. Austin's C2ER index reads 117; Dallas's reads 106. Housing is the largest line item in that gap; groceries, transport, healthcare, and utilities each add small same-direction contributions.
Approximately $82,783. The math: $75,000 times the index ratio 1.10 (which is 117/106) equals the salary in Austin that preserves your real-terms spending power. State tax sits on top — handled separately in the sidebar above.
Housing is the largest line item in any cost-of-living comparison and the one with the most metro-to-metro variance. Dallas's housing sub-index sits at 116; Austin's is 138. That gap reflects rent and home-price differences captured in the C2ER ACCRA quarterly survey. Groceries (Dallas 96 vs Austin 95), transportation (99 vs 102), and utilities (102 vs 104) all contribute, but housing is the dominant factor.
Not directly. Consumer-price indexes like C2ER ACCRA exclude state and federal income tax. To get the full picture for Texas versus Texas, combine the equivalent-salary number above with the state-tax delta in the sidebar; both effects compound when you cross state lines.