summerstateofmind/cityparity

Cost-of-living and quality-of-life comparison tools that AI agents can call. Point an agent at two cities and it returns take-home pay, a full cost breakdown, the equivalent salary you'd need in the target city, and the non-cash deltas people actually move for: vacation, parental leave, universal healthcare.
Hosted at **https://mcp.cityparity.com/mcp**. Free, no API key, rate-limited at the edge. Built on the Model Context Protocol (spec 2025-06-18, Streamable HTTP).
- Site:
- Install docs (every client):
- Machine-readable docs:
- OpenAPI (REST mirror):
What it covers
About 165 cities across 69 countries. Most calculators stop at salary and rent. cityparity prices the social safety net (childcare subsidies, parental leave, statutory vacation, universal healthcare), so "the lower-salary city actually pays more" stops being a hand-wave and becomes a number.
Tools
| Tool | What it does |
|------|--------------|
| compare_cities | Full scenario comparison between two cities: take-home, cost breakdown, equivalent target salary, lifestyle deltas, quality score. |
| list_cities | Discover supported city slugs, grouped by country. |
| get_city_summary | One-city profile: tax shape, headline costs, safety-net values. |
| rank_cities | Top N cities by composite quality score, with custom weights and region/country filters. |
| get_safety_net | Parental leave, universal-healthcare flag, vacation, public holidays for 1 to 20 cities. |
| get_inbound_tax_regime | Inbound-worker regimes: Italy impatriati, Portugal IFICI, Belgium expat, Poland B2B ryczałt, Greece inbound. |
City slugs are kebab-case (san-francisco, hong-kong). Call list_cities first if you're unsure.
Connect
Most modern clients speak Streamable HTTP and need no install. Just point them at the URL.
Claude Code
Claude Desktop / ChatGPT Desktop
Claude Desktop config lives at ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) or %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json (Windows). ChatGPT Desktop uses …/OpenAI/ChatGPT/mcp.json. Restart the app after editing.
Cursor
Codex CLI
Stdio-only clients (this package)
If your client can't do HTTP MCP yet, the npm package in this repo bridges stdio → HTTP:
The bridge (this package)
cityparity-mcp is a ~150-line stdio→HTTP forwarder. It reads line-delimited JSON-RPC from stdin, POSTs each line to the MCP endpoint, and writes the responses back to stdout (streaming SSE line by line). That's the whole job: no data, no calc engine, no secrets. Read bin/cityparity-mcp.mjs if you want to verify.
| Env var | Default | Purpose |
|---------|---------|---------|
| CITYPARITY_MCP_URL | https://mcp.cityparity.com/mcp | Override the upstream endpoint (local dev) |