MIT Living Wage Calculator

I don’t think this is very accurate. In my county the “living wage” is $26.50 for a single adult with no children.

Many young people I know live on much less than this.

This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable.

For example, transportation costs are $9000/year and housing is $20000/year. These are both way more than is necessary.

They need better branding because calling this a living wage is a misnomer and harming their cause.

The older I get the more I realize how fraught the idea of a "living wage" is.

Through mid life, your financial health is not as determined by wages, but by your family/connections. Do you have access to a grandmother who can babysit? A decent second-hand car? A good roommate situation? Just look at the expense table - any one of these things could be worth up to 20% of your income!

And you see that literally right here - are any of us actually comfortable with the idea that the value of your labor should be determined by your marriage status and number of children?

It's kind of telling that countries with "successful" minimum wages either don't have one and just institutionalize collective bargaining, or they do some fancy calculations that start with prevailing median wages and welfare eligibility. The idea of trying to get this number from the bottom up by building expenses just doesn't seem very robust.

2080 hours per year! That's 52 weeks of 40 hours per week. It's also inhuman.

Here in Norway we have five weeks of holiday plus various public holidays and only 37.5 hours per week adding up to about 1700 hours per year.

The cost of childcare seems way underestimated, at least for young children.

It shows $13,641 for my metro (Chicago), but day care costs are easily twice that. Obviously once kids are school-age this is much lower (if going to public school), so maybe that's how you get at this figure.

On the other hand the transportation costs are way overestimated for non-car families (we spend less than $2k/year on local transit for 2 adults and 1 child, obviously this doesn't include airfare for vacations or whatnot). Maybe these are both an artifact of too broad a catchment area (childcare is probably cheaper in the 'burbs, but so likely are average transportation costs).

Someone is siphoning your value. It's quite obvious when you track the productivity, or ask questions about how did your great-grandpa survive at all without machines. Just stating the obvious, don't mind me.

This has been posted many times before, and AFAICT it’s fundamentally misleading, as it doesn’t account for transfer payments (refundable tax credits, food stamps, housing vouchers, ACA subsidies, …)

That artificially inflates the “wage level” needed for the estimated living standard. It also makes the tax figures absurd. No two-parent, two-kid household making $110K is paying 15% of that net in taxes, subtracting deductions, credits and subsidies.

IOW, our “safety net” for middle-income parents could get 5X more generous and this calculator would show the same results.

How are they getting medical costs in San Mateo County so wrong.

$11,896 with 2 children? My Kaiser $14K deductible bronze plan costs $2100 a month. That's more like $25K a year, and that's before I use it... the only reason I have it is in case something traumatic happens. This is the cheapest plan I can get on covered california.

Puerto Rico is always left out of these analyses. AFAIK we are included in the same data sources (like dol.gov), so I'm always disappointing to see the exclusion.

I fell out of love with the living wage when the UK government bumped minimum wage and called it living wage. The government kept on getting raked over the coals by charities who claimed that people working minimum wage were in poverty and so our govenrment bumped the minimum wage by a bit and then announced it as "This is the new NATIONAL LIVING WAGE". Which is just perfect politics. You're the government, so you can just take a term. Trump can brand the Gulf of America, and the UK Tories can just redefine the living wage. Now those charities are stuffed because any time they talk about a living wage everyone gets confused, it cuts the legs out of the conversation.

The core of the problem is that you basically have to have someone define what is an acceptable standard of living. Sharing a flat? Nah, the MIT trained economist thinks that's for the poverty people so that is defined as below living wage. Walk to work? No. You need atleast $10k a year on travel otherwise you're a bus wanker.

A huge amount of this is value judgements on what is an acceptable standard of living from people who benefit from immense privilege but will never experience the thing they're studying.

Anecdotally, I found some of the costs like food and food to be inflated.

When I looked at the methodology, some is based on consumer surveys so it may be more reflective of over-consumption. In other words, it prices in what people want or what they’re used to, not what they need. The counterpoint is that maybe some wealthy countries should be pricing in a higher quality of life, but the “living wage” then becomes a bit of a misnomer.

If you enter in a US city, another takeaway from the rendered table is that U.S. living standards (measured economically) continued to improve for some time after the 1970s despite weak wage growth largely because *more households relied on two earners instead of one*. While productivity kept rising, the gains were increasingly captured at the top and not shared with the workers. Of course that buffer is now long gone, but wages haven't kept up.

Can anyone speak to the reliability of using metropolitan statistical areas for something like this? Having lived across on both sides of the tracks in a few, grouping them for something like this seems like an interesting choice. One that I probably wouldn't agree with, but I'm out of my depth

The problem with defining “living wage” is you must trust that the person defining it has your best interests in mind, and is calculating it while including _your_ needs.

For example, you don’t want me to be the one to define “living wage.” I’ve been a prepper/bushcrafter for 20 years… the ACTUAL “living wage” is _zero_. There are innumerable resources all around you if you know how to find and use them.

The standard of living that one could afford with a "living wage" looks to be very very low. Like, 0 vacations and no house low, for my metro area.

Basically a "ramen profitable" calculator.

seems jusssttt a touch low. like by half

There is something wrong with the transportation cost. I live in a poor rural county, and it says the 0-child transportation cost is $10k+. People's trucks here don't even cost that much, and they don't drive far. I see it counts as 2 working adults, but it's still grossly inflated.

This calculator says that the median household in my county is not making a living wage, which is ridiculous on its face.

Housing data is flawed. Even if you’re single, no kids, you’re limited to what is available and 1 bedrooms in my state can’t be had for less than $1500/mo anywhere in the state. Yet this says housing costs annually would be $12000. How? I think the data this is based off of is super stale.

For Phoenix[0] it shows $44 for 1 adult 1 child, but $42 for 2 adults 1 child with 1 adult working. Is this because of a child tax credit or something?

[0]: https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/38060

This whole dataset needs to be downloadable, instead of being behind their UI..

I'm going to base it off of the peninsula (San Mateo County) in the Bay Area for a single person. https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/06081

By my estimations, it's not a great calculator. $2.5k/month for all housing costs. I'm not saying it's not possible to find a studio + utilities but that's not a fun place to live. No AC, no insulation, built for a different climate which was 70 years ago, laundromat or (hopefully) coin-op laundry in building, likely near busy roads (101, el camino) or train tracks with no sound insulation, still extremely car dependent (which is included in this calculator - gas/electricity, taxes, and cars in CA are very expensive), etc. Again, doable but competitive market and not a fun one. You'd be guaranteed to NEVER own any property at that income. Until we have some public housing utopia, I'd say ownership should be accounted for in a living wage. Otherwise, you're gonna get evicted when retirement hits.

Its calculation on taxes seems off to me as well. https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator#... Says $72308 in San Mateo, CA gives you $55793 - not $59791. You'd have to make close to $80k/yr to get the amount they suggest to live.

This calculator does not include retirement savings, emergency saving, etc. It just assumes you'll comfortably live paycheck to paycheck until you die and never save a dime. In our country, you will not be getting $60k/yr post tax from social security. So, this is a stupid calculator unless you plan to never retire or never experience job loss (max payout is $450/week for unemployment in CA), etc.

US only it seems?

This is very cool to see all compiled and easily navigable.

The thing I want to see next would be the sister calculator: what it would take for a business of X size employees, Y revenue, Z other expenses, to increase wages to these standards.

This feels like it would help to close that gap. Give a business owner a concrete path to take. Just saying something is broken isn't going to get it fixed.

Just typing all this I think I have my weekend project lined up.

Thanks MIT!

Pretty good, but not granular enough. For example, the area I grew up in is much cheaper to live in that the metro it is tagged to. The two areas are separated by 15 miles (~24km).

If you live in a large city, then it works great.

Does this base itself on the metric started in 1963, that was eseentially a big guess that 3x starvation level was well off? because we have better numbers now. Avg us salary is 60k, but to take car of the needs of a family of 4, not in starvation range is ~$160k/year

I think I'm mis-understanding.

How is 1 adult + 3 children at $107.95 and 2 adults + 3 children at $63.97

5 people could require more money than 4. You could say in the 2nd case it's $63.97x2 but that doesn't make any sense either because the table also has 1 adult 0 children $29.31 and 2 adults 0 children at $41.81. Clearly they are not doing 2x to that $41.81 as it would be more than the $29.31 at 2x

Was this AI generated?