1. Gross income becomes modeled take-home pay
Phase 1 estimates single-filer W-2 employee federal tax, example state income tax, Social Security and Medicare. The tax brackets, deductions and caps are synthetic scenario parameters. The estimator does not cover local income tax, credits, retirement deferrals, benefits, self-employment, complex residency rules or individual circumstances. It must not be quoted as an official current-year tax calculator.
2. After-tax income is normalized by broad regional prices
All-items Regional Price Parity has a national average baseline of 100. The purchasing-power formula is take-home annual pay ÷ (RPP ÷ 100). Sample RPPs are fixtures rather than verified Bureau of Economic Analysis values. A production release must preserve each area's source code, reference year, definition and potential crosswalk between datasets.
3. Rent-adjusted cash is not double-adjusted
Monthly net pay minus monthly user-entered rent estimates immediate cash left after housing. Because the all-items price index already includes housing, we display that cash figure separately from broad RPP-adjusted income. The latter is not presented as the precise amount of discretionary spending after rent.
4. Required salary is solved from a target take-home amount
The relocation and living-cost calculators use a monotone binary search through the same simplified tax model. The relocation target is broad price-equivalent net income. The living-cost target is the greater of an explicit spending budget or a rent ceiling of 40%, 30% or 25% of net income depending on the lifestyle band. Its initial use of all-items RPP as a nonhousing proxy is intentionally identified as a limitation.
5. Source provenance and release gates
The production pipeline must download and validate official BLS OEWS occupation wages, official BEA Regional Price Parities, authoritative tax rules and a documented rent source. IRS SOI ZIP data may inform aggregate research but must not substitute for personal tax computation. Every source needs a publisher, reference year, retrieval date, geography and verification status. Missing records should be withheld from indexing, not silently filled with fabricated values.
All Phase 1 public pages are noindex. Phase 2 will add source ingestion, controlled static route generation, structured datasets and a sitemap limited to verified indexable pages. An editorial review and legal/privacy assessment remain outstanding.