Dear Salary:

There are many such sites, but they will not give you the information you really need. What you are talking about is a cost-of-living comparison site. What it will not tell you is what kind of salary you can command in any area of the country. In fact, the information it will give you will likely mislead you. If you are earning $60K in Missouri the cost of living comparison sites might tell you the comparable salary in California is $110K, but that does not mean that any employer in California would pay you that amount.

The level of compensation in each area of the country is predicated on one factor only -- the demand for a given talent and the supply of people who can do that work. The cost of living of the area hardly enters the picture. I have simultaneously worked with client companies in Minneapolis and Silicon Valley that were both trying to hire the identical set of skills. Even though the cost of living between the areas was radically different, the salaries being offered were almost exactly the same. People mistakenly think that high cost areas must pay the very highest salaries, but that is not necessarily true. Sometimes it is the out of the way areas with moderate or even low cost of living that command the most pay because there is no local talent from which to draw, so companies must import talented people such as IT auditors. In those situations, the IT auditors with the rare talent can be some of the highest paid people in the county.

The funniest salary websites I have ever seen are the ones that take relative salaries and extrapolate how all professions are paid. One such website, for example, would have you believe that IT Audit Directors in Butte, Montana are paid $160,000. The site fails to tell you that there are no such positions within 300 miles!

Your best source of information is a good recruiter who works actively in the marketplace. Before even thinking of relocating, it is critical to find out what your skill set's value is in potential new areas. To a new employer it is totally irrelevant what you have been paid in other parts of the country. The new employer will only care what other people with similar skills are demanding in the local market.