How this works
Standard converters price your salary against a national shopping basket — mostly food, rent and fuel, where India really is several times cheaper. Yours probably looks different. This page shows every price we use and where it came from.
Your answers become a basket. Nine questions, each worth a rupee amount a year.
Each category has a price ratio. Rent is 5× cheaper here. A MacBook is not.
Tax on both sides. We compare take-home, then work back to the gross salary you would need.
The prices are seed values, not yet hand-checked.
They come from the sources below and are calibrated so the national basket reproduces the published World Bank figure. But the quarterly price panel has not been run yet, so every SKU in it is listed with its price left empty — because nobody has priced it, and an invented price is worse than a missing one.
The idea
Purchasing power parity is not a fact about a country. It is a fact about a basket. The World Bank's figure for India averages a national basket dominated by cereals, rent and fuel — exactly where India is three to ten times cheaper. If your money goes to imported hardware, dollar-priced software and flights, that average is describing someone else's life.
So we build the basket from your answers instead:
price index = Σ (your spend share × that category's India/US price ratio)
what you need = your take-home × that index, then grossed back up for tax
A ratio of 0.25 means India is four times cheaper; 1.15 means it
is fifteen percent more expensive.
The details behind that
Nine questions, not percentages
Nobody can say what share of their income goes to "specialty food and beverage". People
can say how many trips abroad they take. So each answer carries an annual rupee amount,
and those amounts become the weights — you never make anything add up to 100%. Every
option shows the figure it assumes. They live in one table in src/lifestyle.js.
What we estimate for you
Groceries, transport and out-of-pocket healthcare are not lifestyle choices, so we estimate them from a floor plus a capped share of salary and label them "estimated" in the breakdown.
"I live with family" does not set housing to zero. You still consume housing and would pay for it in the US, so a modest amount is imputed — as the World Bank does for owner-occupiers. Zeroing it would perversely make living rent-free look like it makes India more expensive.
Savings
Whatever is left over is savings, and savings buys no goods, so it stays out of the price comparison. Only the mix of your spending affects the answer, never the total.
This is also why the two salaries do not leave you equally wealthy. What you spend follows local prices; what you keep converts at the exchange rate.
Cities
A city pair scales each category by
(india_city / us_city) ^ exposure. Housing has an exposure of 1.0 and moves
fully; electronics and software have 0, because a MacBook costs the same in Pune as in
Mumbai. Comparing against San Francisco rather than Austin changes the denominator, not
India.
The five-year projection
Paid in rupees, depreciation is a slow pay cut: your salary does not move but the dollar-priced part of your basket gets dearer every year. Paid in dollars it is a raise, capped by that same dollar-priced share.
It is a mechanical projection of one variable, not a forecast. It holds relative prices and your basket constant and ignores inflation differentials, which push the other way.
The twelve prices, and where each comes from
A ratio is the India price divided by the US price at the current exchange rate: 0.25 means India is four times cheaper, 1.15 means it is fifteen percent more expensive. The figures below are before any city adjustment. "Confidence" is our own assessment of sampling quality; categories marked low are flagged in the calculator itself when they carry meaningful weight in your spending.
| # | Category | r (India/US) | Confidence | Status | Sources |
|---|
The control test
The single most important test in this build is that the National Average basket — the one the standard conversion assumes you have — reproduces the published World Bank figure. If it does not, the category prices are wrong, and no amount of interface polish would save the result. It runs in CI on every change, along with the other worked cases below and the requirement that a frugal set of answers stays near the standard 3:1.
These reference baskets are not shown in the calculator — your answers build your own. They exist so that the maths can be checked against a published number by anyone who wants to.
| Preset | Price index | PPP factor | Ratio | $100k equivalent |
|---|
The Saver basket landing near 3:1 is not an accident and not a concession — it is the point. If every set of answers produced 1.7:1, this would be a polemic wearing a calculator's clothes. Answer the nine questions frugally and the tool will tell you, plainly, that the standard conversion is about right for you.
The hand-checked price panel
The panel is the credibility anchor: roughly forty hand-checked SKUs across both markets,
re-priced quarterly. Each entry is specified precisely enough that someone else can price
the same thing and get the same answer. A category's ratio is the median of
india_price / (us_price × spot) across its SKUs.
Record the India price in INR as displayed to the consumer (tax-inclusive, since Indian MRP includes GST) and the US price in USD as displayed (pre-sales-tax, since US shelf prices exclude it). This asymmetry is deliberate — it reflects what each consumer actually hands over at the register — and it is one reason the electronics ratio sits above parity.
| SKU | Category | India (₹) | US ($) | Observed |
|---|
Tax rules and rates
Comparing two salaries gross would quietly mislead, because the same nominal figure is taxed very differently in the two countries. So the calculator taxes the salary you enter, price- adjusts the take-home, and then grosses back up on the other side to find the salary that leaves you equally well off. That last step has no closed form once surcharge is involved, so it is solved numerically.
Indian marginal relief is implemented properly at the section 87A limit and at each surcharge threshold. Without it, earning one rupee more than ₹50 lakh would appear to cost you lakhs — a cliff that does not exist in the actual law. A test sweeps every income from zero to ₹2.5 crore in ₹5,000 steps and fails the build if take-home ever falls as gross rises.
| Rule | Value |
|---|
City indices
Each city carries a non-tradable price index relative to its own country's national average. These scale the non-tradable share of each category, per the exposure model above.
| City | Country | Non-tradable index |
|---|
The exchange rate
A stale spot rate silently breaks every headline number, so the rate is fetched live, cached for six hours, and always displayed with its source and timestamp on the calculator. If the providers are unreachable the tool falls back to a bundled rate and says so rather than quietly using a number from last year. Responses outside a plausible 40–250 band are rejected as broken rather than believed.
What this does not model
Real Rate compares prices. That is all it does, and the gap between "prices" and "should I take this job" is wide. Out of scope in V1, deliberately:
- Tax. The largest omission by far. Both sides are gross-of-tax, and effective rates differ enough to move a conclusion on their own.
- Equity, RSUs and bonuses. Often the actual difference between offers.
- Employer benefits. Especially health cover, which is why the healthcare category is explicitly out-of-pocket only.
- Immigration, visas, and the option value of either.
- Currency risk on savings, and any investment consideration.
- Everything that is not a price: family, air quality, commute, career trajectory, whether you want to live there.
It is also worth saying that a basket is not fixed. People substitute — if imported cheese costs four times more, most people buy less imported cheese. This model holds your basket constant by design, which makes it a good description of maintaining a given lifestyle and a poor description of adapting to a new one.
This is not financial, tax, immigration or investment advice.
Check it yourself
Every price, weight and city index lives in a single versioned file,
data/config.json, and every question and rupee amount in
src/lifestyle.js. Neither requires a code change to update. The engine is a few
hundred lines of dependency-free JavaScript, and the test suite encodes the claims this page
makes — including the control test above. Change a price, run npm test, and see
exactly which claims break.