civic tools

What one earner actually has to make to keep a family of four in this county

For a public-interest calculator: what one earner actually has to make to keep a family of four in this county. A calculator for the gross hourly wage one earner needs to support two adults and two children in this county, modestly and safely, while still saving toward a house deposit.

We built this one for ourselves: a public-interest calculator. It earns its place here on the same evidence as any client project.

What was going wrong?

National cost-of-living figures are close to useless for a specific county, and the published local numbers rarely show their working, so anyone trying to check them has to take the answer on faith. That matters when the number is being used to argue about what a job should pay.

What did we build?

A calculator for the gross hourly wage one earner needs to support two adults and two children in this county, modestly and safely, while still saving toward a house deposit. Every input is visible and adjustable, so a reader who disagrees with an assumption can change it and watch the answer move rather than argue with a headline figure. It runs on your own machine with the network unplugged.

What changed?

This one is built but not live yet, so there is no result to measure. The day it launches and the numbers come in, they go here, dated.

How do we know this is real?

Build record: 2 tracked changes, 3,772 lines of working code, 1 automated test files. Every number here comes straight from the project's build history.