U.S. states with the highest salaries for accountants and auditors

2. Salaries by state adjusted for the cost of living

We will now take a look at the same salaries but this time we will adjust them for the cost of living in each state.  We used the SARPP Regional Price Parities from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis to adjust the salaries for the cost of living.

The adjustment takes the original salary for a state and divides it by the cost of living index in that state.  This process normalizes salaries by state to the same denominator.  For example, the original (unadjusted) salary for California is $75,880.  The cost of living measure for California is 116.4%: this means that it costs about 16.4% more to live in California than the average cost of living across the U.S.  We would take $75,880 and divide it by 116.4% to arrive at an adjusted salary of $65,189.  On a flip side, we can take a state like Alabama with a medium salary of $63,800 and a cost of living index of 85.8% (the cost of living index implies that it costs 14.2% less to live in Alabama than the national average).  The adjusted salary in Alabama is determined by dividing $63,800 by 85.8% to arrive at $74,359.  The map of adjusted salaries below shows a different distribution of the highest salaries for accountants and auditors (i.e., darker colors mean higher adjusted salaries):

Cost of living adjusted salaries by state

The top 10 states with the highest adjusted salaries are:

  1. District of Columbia: $84,566
  2. North Carolina: $77,535
  3. Georgia: $76,953
  4. Rhode Island: $76,871
  5. Virginia: $76,328
  6. Texas: $75,617
  7. Delaware: $75,010
  8. Oklahoma: $74,862
  9. New York: $74,497
  10. Alabama: $74,359
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