How to Compare Cost of Living Between Two Cities: 10 Lines

Start to compare the cost of living between two cities and ask the Bureau of Labor Statistics for Dallas gasoline: $3.836 a gallon for September 2026, to the tenth of a cent. Ask the same API for a dozen eggs in Dallas and it answers that the series does not exist. Not "no data this month." The series ID APUS37A708111, eggs in Dallas-Fort Worth, was never built.

That gap is the whole job. A cost-of-living comparison you build yourself is a grid of cells, and each cell is filled from whatever geography the publishing agency happens to measure at. Gasoline exists for a metro. Eggs exist, at best, for a census region. Water exists only for a single utility's service area, and sometimes only for the part of it inside city limits. If you do not record which level each number came from, you end up comparing a Denver price against a Western average and calling the difference a cost of moving.

This is the build procedure: the ten lines, the table behind each one, and what to write next to the number so you can still trust it in March.

The columns go in before any numbers do

Lay out the sheet before you look anything up. Most comparison errors are column errors, not lookup errors.

The quantity column is the only one filled from your own bills, not an agency's. A town does not have a gas bill; a household in a town does. Copy twelve months of your current electricity, gas, water and fuel use out of your own statements first, then hold those quantities constant across both candidate towns. The only thing that should change between Town A and Town B is price. Where your quantity genuinely changes (more heating in Denver, more air conditioning in Phoenix), the climate-zone heating and cooling sheet is where that adjustment comes from.

The geography column needs a ladder, from best to worst: address, city, county, metro, state, census region, nation. Every time you fall down a rung, write it down.

Lines 1 and 2 are already built

Shelter and electricity are covered in the seven numbers that decide a move: ACS tables B25064 and B25077 plus live listings for rent or value, and EIA's state residential price per kilowatt-hour times your own usage. Copy those two rows across. The other eight are where the source work is.

Line 3: heating fuel, and why the summer number lies

For natural gas, EIA publishes the residential price by state, monthly and annually, in dollars per thousand cubic feet (Mcf). I pulled the annual series from EIA's natural gas price table on 31 October 2026:

Use the annual column. The monthly one is distorted in summer, when the fixed customer charge on every bill gets divided by almost no gas. EIA's U.S. figure for August 2026 is $27.05 per Mcf, nearly twice the 2025 annual average, and nobody's heating costs doubled in August. If you take a monthly price, take it from January.

Two traps sit in this line. First, look at Florida at the top, and Arizona above the U.S. average. Where homes use little gas, each unit carries more of the fixed charges, and a high price on a small quantity can still be a small annual number; this is exactly why the quantity column comes from your own bills.

Second, the BLS also publishes a piped-gas price per therm ($1.700 for the U.S. city average in September 2026; $1.247 Midwest, $2.093 South). Do not use it to compare places. BLS's own average price fact sheet says the per-therm and per-kilowatt-hour averages are "generally not suitable" for place-to-place comparisons, because the bills priced in each area use different consumption amounts and rate schedules.

Units: your gas bill may be in therms, CCF or Mcf. A therm is a heat unit; CCF and Mcf are volumes. The conversion depends on the heat content of the gas, which your utility usually prints on the bill. Convert your own quantity to Mcf using that figure before multiplying.

Line 4: water and sewer, read from the rate schedule itself

No federal table gives a water bill. You need the utility's current rate schedule, and you need to read the footnotes, because the structure differs more than the prices do.

Here are two schedules, read on 31 October 2026.

Denver Water, 2026, inside the City of Denver, 5/8" or 3/4" meter (rate page):

• Fixed monthly charge: $20.91
• Tier 1, from zero up to your average winter consumption (AWC): $3.02 per 1,000 gallons
• Tier 2, from AWC up to AWC + 15,000 gallons: $5.44, plus a $1.10 drought charge
• Tier 3, above that: $7.25, plus $2.20 drought charge
• AWC is your average billed use for January through March, with a floor of 5,000 gallons and a ceiling of 15,000
• Temporary drought pricing applies from May 2026 water use through 30 April 2027, or until the board acts again

Phoenix, rates effective 1 March 2025, inside city, 5/8" meter (rate schedule PDF):

• Monthly service charge: $4.64, which includes 5 CCF of water October through May and 8 CCF June through September (1 CCF = 748 gallons)
• Each CCF beyond that: $4.93 in December through March, $5.65 in April, May, October and November, $6.13 in June through September
• Environmental charge: $0.62 on every CCF metered, including the included ones
• Customers outside city limits pay 150%

Now run one household through both. Take 8 CCF (5,984 gallons) in January and 16 CCF (11,968 gallons) in July, so the Denver AWC is 5,984 gallons.

Without the drought surcharge, Denver's July bill would be $71.53. Phoenix's schedule says its charges are also subject to applicable sales taxes and surcharges, which the arithmetic above leaves out.

Then sewer, which is where the comparison usually breaks. Phoenix bills it on the same city services bill, and the charge for a single-family home is set from your January-March water use. The city's sewer fee schedule effective 1 July 2026 uses 83% of that winter average as billable flow, at $2.9935 per CCF plus a $0.7262 environmental charge, plus a $1.00 monthly charge, with a $4.50 minimum. The schedule's own worked average for a single-family home, 7.48 billable CCF and $28.82 a month, reconciles exactly to $1.00 + 7.48 × ($2.9935 + $0.7262). For the 8 CCF winter in this example: 6.64 billable CCF, $25.70 a month, every month.

Denver Water's 2026 rate page lists water charges only. Nothing on it covers sewer or wastewater, which for a Denver address is billed under a separate rate. I did not pull that schedule, so in this example the Denver sewer cell stays empty, and it should look empty on the sheet.

The trap is to put Phoenix's $50.09 January total (water plus sewer) next to Denver's $38.98 and conclude Denver is cheaper. Those are different services. Two more footnotes change the cell by address: Phoenix charges 150% outside city limits, and Denver Water's "Outside City, Total Service" customers pay $4.37, $7.87 and $10.49 per 1,000 gallons instead of $3.02, $5.44 and $7.25. A suburb with a Phoenix or Denver mailing address can be on either schedule. If your well-versus-city question is still open for an address, the water supply check comes before this row.

Line 5: motor fuel, metro if it exists

EIA's weekly retail gasoline table publishes regular gasoline for the nation, five regions (PADDs), nine states and ten cities. For the week of 26 October 2026:

• U.S.: $4.269
• Texas: $3.632; Houston: $3.681
• Colorado: $4.458; Denver: $4.407
• Ohio: $4.380; Cleveland: $4.316
• West Coast region: $5.417, with California at $5.888

The next release was scheduled for 3 November 2026.

BLS gives a monthly gasoline price for more metros. Denver (APUS48B74714) was $4.200 in September 2026, Dallas-Fort Worth (APUS37A74714) $3.836. BLS fuel prices include federal, state and local taxes, so they are pump prices.

Notice that Denver has two federal gasoline numbers 20.7 cents apart. They describe different periods (a September month against a late-October week) and come from different surveys. Neither is wrong. Write the vintage next to whichever one you use, and use the same source for both towns in a pair.

Phoenix is the harder cell. It is not one of EIA's ten cities, and Arizona is not one of its nine states. The nearest EIA figure is the West Coast region at $5.417, an average that includes California at $5.888. Dropping that number into a Phoenix cell would likely inflate the line. Use a station-level spot price from a local source instead, and mark the geography column "spot, date."

The arithmetic: annual miles ÷ your car's mpg × price. At 10,000 miles and 28 mpg, that is 357 gallons, so every dollar of price difference is $357 a year.

Line 6: groceries, where the federal data runs out

The BLS average price series give national and four-region prices for staple foods. From the BLS API for September 2026:

(Bananas were $0.656 a pound and whole chicken $2.064 a pound, U.S. city average.)

The series ID tells you what you have. It is APU + a four-character area code + the item code: 0000 is the U.S. city average, 0300 the South, 0400 the West, and a metro looks like S48B for Denver. Item 708111 is eggs, 709112 whole milk. The BLS series format page has the full key.

Four warnings from the pull itself. BLS food prices are published without sales tax; the tax goes on line 8, not here. Some regional series stop: Northeast and Midwest whole milk have no 2026 values, and West eggs return "series does not exist." October 2025 is blank in every food series, so a twelve-month average across that month has eleven values. And Denver and Phoenix are both in the West region, so on this line they get identical numbers. The federal data says the grocery difference between them is zero, which only means it does not measure that difference.

To get a real one, price the same basket of fifteen to twenty items on the website of a grocery chain that operates in both towns, with the store set to a branch near each candidate address, on the same day. Record the chain, the branch and the date in the source column. Then multiply by your own monthly quantities. The BLS regional numbers stay on the sheet as a sanity check: if your basket says milk is $6 a gallon in one town and the West average is $4.621, check the size and the brand before you believe it.

Line 7: insurance, which a table can only bracket

Homeowners and renters insurance needs a real quote on a real address. The reasons are in where home insurance is hard to buy, and no state average replaces that quote.

Auto insurance has one federal-scale bracket. The NAIC's 2022/2023 Auto Insurance Database Report, adopted December 2025, gives average expenditure per insured vehicle by state:

The countrywide number rose 13.99% in a single year, and the data year is 2023. On a sheet built in late 2026 that is a three-year-old figure in a fast-moving line, so its vintage column should say so plainly. The NAIC itself warns that the averages ignore vehicle type, limits, deductibles and state tort law, and that direct comparisons between states "should be treated with a high degree of caution." Use the table to tell you whether a quote is in a plausible range. Put the quote, priced at the new garaging address, in the cell.

Line 8: sales tax and property tax

Sales tax is two numbers stacked. The state rate is easy: the IRS's 2025 Schedule A instructions print each state's rate in the header of its Optional State Sales Tax Table. Colorado's state rate is 2.90%, Arizona's 5.60%, Texas's 6.25%; Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon have no state rate.

The local add-on depends on the address. In Texas, cities, counties, special-purpose districts and transit authorities can add up to 2%, for a combined maximum of 8.25%, according to the Texas Comptroller, which offers a Sales Tax Rate Locator by address. Washington's Department of Revenue has a Tax Rate Lookup Tool that works the same way. Most states with local sales taxes publish something similar; look for it on the state revenue department's site and enter the candidate address, not the city name. Annual cost is the combined rate times your taxable spending, which is not the same as all your spending: whether groceries are taxed varies by state and sometimes by city, so check that before you multiply.

Property tax belongs to the parcel, and the bill for one address explains how to pull it from the county. For a sanity check, ACS table B25103 gives the median real estate taxes paid by owner-occupied homes. From the 2025 one-year file:

• Arizona: $1,894
• Colorado: $2,945
• Ohio: $3,107
• Florida: $3,180
• Texas: $4,205 (with a mortgage $5,404; without, $2,725)
• New Jersey: $9,648

Texas shows why the split columns matter. Owners without a mortgage pay about half what mortgaged owners pay, and the table does not say why. If you are buying, compare against the "with a mortgage" column. If you rent, the property tax is inside your rent and this row stays blank.

Line 9: the car itself

Fuel is on line 5. This line is the rest of owning a car, and the part that moves between towns is mostly how many miles you drive and how many cars the household needs. The transit and car-dependence check answers the second question and carries AAA's 2026 ownership costs.

For the miles, one published per-mile figure is the IRS standard mileage rate: 72.5 cents per business mile from 1 January to 30 June 2026, raised to 76 cents from 1 July (IR-2026-29), according to the IRS mileage rate page. The 76 cents is the business rate (medical is 23.5 cents, charity 14), and it is a deduction rate, not a measurement of your own car, so treat it as a rough price on the difference in miles. A town that adds 4,000 miles a year of errands puts about $3,040 on this line at 76 cents. That figure overlaps with the fuel line, so if you use the IRS rate here, take the extra miles out of line 5.

Line 10: health coverage by county

If your employer's plan is national, this line is the employer's rate table and it does not move. If you buy your own coverage, the number is set by county.

CMS publishes average benchmark premiums, the second-lowest-cost silver plan (SLCSP), for HealthCare.gov states in its QHP Choice and Premiums report. For plan year 2025, before any premium tax credit, the average for a 40-year-old was $497 a month, up 3% from 2024. The county appendix shows how far that moves:

Austin and Houston are in the same state and $85.88 a month apart for the same person, which is $1,030 a year on one line.

Two limits. The newest edition on the CMS page on 31 October 2026 was plan year 2025; there was no 2026 edition posted. And states that run their own marketplace are not in the file. Colorado is one of them, so the Denver cell needs that state's own shopping tool for the county. Whatever you put here, write "before subsidy" or "after subsidy" in the column. A sheet with one town before and one after will be wrong by hundreds a month.

The sheet, with the Phoenix and Denver cells filled where the sources reach

Read down the right-hand column before the numbers. Four geography levels, vintages running from 2023 to late October 2026, and five cells that are not real numbers yet. That is an honest sheet. The comparison you can make from it right now is narrow: Colorado's piped gas is cheaper per unit, Phoenix's state sales tax is higher before local add-ons, and the health line cannot be compared until Colorado's county price is in. The water row is roughly comparable only once Denver's sewer charge is found.

The gaps are the to-do list, and they are short. Price one grocery basket twice. Get one auto quote and one homeowners quote per address. Enter each address into the state's sales tax locator. Pull Denver's wastewater rate. After that, multiply each price by your quantity column and subtract.

When you come back to the sheet, start with the fuel cell. EIA posts a new weekly gasoline figure every week (the 26 October numbers came out on the 27th), so line 5 goes stale first; water and tax lines change once a year at most.