A year ago after seeing a claim that $250k in San Francisco is like $100k in most of the rest of the country, due to rent, taxes, and food, I tried to check if that was true and it didn't seem to be. What have I missed?

For rent, a median one bedroom apartment in SF would be $14-18k/year more than a median one bedroom apartment in Seattle, Chicago, Nashville, Orlando, Sacramento, Austin, or Fresno.

Average monthly spending on food in SF is about $150 above the national average, so that's another $1800/year you need. But that probably includes a lot of people who do their own cooking. Maybe tech workers need to buy all their meals. I found a tourist planning site that said the average tourist in SF spends $32/day on meals, so let's use that instead of $150/month above national food average. That would mean we need $12k/year extra for SF for food.

So someone coming to SF from one of those other places needs an after tax income that is equal to their after tax from their $100k in their old city, plus $30k after tax for rent and food.

That requires a salary of $148k.

That's a long way from $300k, so what other costs are missing?