The Relative Cost of Living by State

The Tax Foundation has provided a wonderful illustration of the relative cost of living in each of the United States:

In the map, the Tax Foundation has adjusted the value of $100 according to its spending power in each state, or rather, for each state’s relative purchasing power parity, and in doing so, has shown that 100 U.S. dollars is not worth the same in each state in terms of how much of a defined basket of goods and services that it can buy.

It occurs to us that there’s another way can illustrate the data, which might provide the basis for some other interesting analysis. So, to that end, we generated the following interactive map to visualize each state’s relative affordability as a percentage of the national average:

We find that Illinois comes closest to the national average, with Mississippi being where money goes the farthest and Washington D.C. as the place where money doesn’t go far enough.