Privacy Policy

Plain English: what we collect, why, who else sees it, and how to opt out. You can read every page on this site without telling us anything about yourself.

Effective 9 November 2026

Who we are

CostOfLivingByState.com is operated by Digital Signet Limited, 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. Digital Signet Limited is the data controller for this site. Contact: privacy@digitalsignet.com.

What we collect

This site has no accounts, no logins and no sign-up forms. The cost-of-living calculator runs entirely in your browser: the salary and location figures you enter are never sent to us or stored on a server. The data we do process comes from two sources.

Aggregate analytics. Google Analytics 4 records your visit (page viewed, referring page, device type, approximate location by country or region, and a pseudonymous identifier) so we can see which pages are useful. IP addresses are anonymised.

Calculators. The paycheck, mortgage, inflation, savings and retirement calculators run entirely in your browser: the figures you type are not sent to us or stored. To see which calculators are used, Google Analytics receives an event naming the calculator, the state or mode chosen, the page you came from, and a broad range for the main amount (for example "100-150k"), never the exact figure. The calculator’s web address holds your inputs so that a link can be shared; anyone you send that link to can see them.

How this site is funded, and your choices

This site is free to read and carries no display advertising. It loads no advertising network script, and nothing on it sets cookies or reads advertising identifiers in order to target ads. Nothing commercial influences a figure on this site.

US visitors. We do not sell or share personal information as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA/CPRA) and similar state laws define those terms, so there is nothing to opt out of. We honour the Global Privacy Control signal regardless, and we do not knowingly collect the personal information of anyone under 16.

UK and EU visitors. The only cookies this site sets are Google Analytics measurement cookies, with IP anonymisation. You can block them with a tracker-blocking extension, the Google Analytics opt-out add-on or your browser's private mode, and the site works exactly the same.

Cookies and analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to understand, in aggregate, which pages are useful. Google Analytics uses cookies and pseudonymous identifiers to measure traffic. No advertising cookies are set. We do not use cookies to build a profile of you ourselves.

Service providers

A small number of providers process data on our behalf: Cloudflare (DNS, security and hosting) and Google Analytics (aggregate site statistics). We require them to process personal data only for the services they provide to us and in line with applicable data protection law.

International transfers

We are a UK controller serving a largely US readership. Our service providers, including Google Analytics, may process data in the United States and other countries. Where UK or EU data protection law applies to a transfer, we rely on appropriate safeguards such as adequacy arrangements or standard contractual clauses.

Legal basis and retention

Where UK or EU law applies, we process analytics data on the basis of your consent (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(a)); you can withdraw it at any time by blocking Google Analytics as described above.

We hold no personal data of our own. Google Analytics data is retained for 14 months and then aggregated or deleted, per our GA4 configuration.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you have the right to ask us to:

give you a copy of the data we hold about you (access);
correct it (rectification);
delete it (erasure);
limit what we do with it (restriction);
stop processing it (objection);
stop selling or sharing it for targeted advertising;
withdraw consent you previously gave.

Email privacy@digitalsignet.com and we will act within one month (45 days for CCPA requests). We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights. If you are in the UK you can also complain to the ICO at ico.org.uk; if you are in the EU, to your local supervisory authority.

Children and changes

This site publishes reference material on state cost of living. It is not directed to children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child under 13 has provided personal information, email privacy@digitalsignet.com and we will delete it.

If we change this policy we will post the new version on this page with a new effective date.

See also about and editorial framework and methodology for how the data on this site is sourced.