What Kultranz is
Kultranz is an independent data project. We build free, no-signup calculators and reference tables for everyday money questions - what a job pays in your city, how far that salary goes after local costs, and what your paycheck looks like after taxes - using official U.S. government data.
We are not a bank, broker, or advisory service, and we don’t publish opinion dressed up as research. Our value is simple and verifiable: real public data, computed with documented formulas, shown transparently. That now covers more than 1,860 published pages: 20 occupations across 50 metros (996 occupation-metro wage pairs), cost-of-living comparisons between 990 city pairs, and gross-to-net paycheck math for all 50 states plus DC.
Who publishes this site
Kultranz is published by [OWNER-NAME], [OWNER-TITLE], who also serves as data lead and answers media and data questions. The fastest way to reach us is [email protected]: number-checking and factual-error reports get priority handling, and we commit to verifying any challenged figure against its official source.
Everything else about how the content is produced is on our editorial policy and editorial team pages.
The data pipeline, start to finish
Every number on this site travels the same road, and each step is inspectable:
- Ingest named releases. Wages come from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS); price levels from BEA Regional Price Parities; housing, rent, and income from the Census American Community Survey; federal tax brackets from IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-32; FICA rates and the wage base from the Social Security Administration; state schedules from each state’s revenue department.
- Normalize into one store. All series land in a single SQLite database keyed by metro, occupation (SOC code), and state, so every page reads from the same numbers - no page carries its own private copy of a statistic.
- Compute with tested formulas. “Real pay” is salary x 100 / the metro’s RPP; equivalent salaries scale by the RPP ratio; take-home pay runs through one tax engine shared by the calculators, the published pages, and our public API. The engine and generators sit behind 267 automated tests.
- Verify against the official schedule. When a tax or index change lands, engine outputs are checked against the agency’s own tables to the cent before anything is published. Every data page carries a “Data verified” stamp naming the month of the last full re-verification.
- Publish, then correct in public. When we find an error we fix it, say what was wrong, how many pages were affected, and how the fix was verified - in the open data corrections log.
The full method, with vintages and formulas, is on the methodology page.
How the content is made
The calculators and data pages are computed from those datasets, not estimated or guessed. Where we publish plain-language explainers, they cite primary sources for factual claims (IRS, BLS, CFPB, SEC), are produced under a human-supervised, AI-assisted editorial workflow described in our editorial policy, and are clearly labeled as educational reference - not personalized financial advice. For decisions about your specific situation, consult a licensed professional.
How we keep the lights on
Kultranz is free, supported by display advertising and one paid product, the Salary Negotiation Brief. Ads are clearly labeled, we avoid intrusive formats, and advertising never influences how we source or compute the data. See our affiliate disclosure and privacy policy.
Corrections
Spot a number that looks off? Contact us and we’ll verify it against the source and fix it. The fixes themselves are public: see the data corrections log for every correction to date, including three 2026 state tax schedules other calculators still carry wrong.