An opportunity at my company came up that would require the family to move from a lower COL area to a much higher one. I've looked at the COL calculators online and have gotten differing results.

Which do y'all think is the best one to use?

Highest one you can find from a legitimate source to help in salary negotiation

Your best bet would be to find someone who works in compensation for a large enough company to have access to a system like MarketPay, which gathers survey data from all the big surveys (Towers Watson, Mercer, etc). Then, they can look up the cost of labor by region (city, state, whatever) for the type of work you do.

A company isn't going to care much about cost of living - that's on you. What matters is what it would take to hire someone to do the same work in that area. For example, the cost of living is high in Hawaii, but cost of labor is cheap - even though the COL is high, people are willing to work for less there because lots of people want to live in Hawaii.

Any suggestions of legitimate sources? I saw CNN.com and bankrate.com had one...

It just depends on your company and how they price jobs.

If your company is small enough, they may not really be looking to market-price jobs, and then your battle is just swaying their opinion. In that case, online calculators may be useful depending on the decision maker - if he or she really wants to keep you and has the power to give you a bump, maybe showing a higher cost of living as shown by a cnn calculator will sway them.

However, if you're with a larger company, you will be likely be arguing with someone who uses a comp department or consultant to market price jobs, and you'll want to use real facts and data to make a strong case for why it costs more to hire your skills in that area. The best source is compensation surveys, which you'll generally need a subscription to the survey to get, and your best bet there would be a compensation analyst - I don't know of any big players that make surveys publicly available (and small ones are worthless because they don't have enough participants to be meaningful). That's why I said find a comp analyst who has access to a corporate subscription. Maybe you have a linked-in connection you can hit up (sorry, I don't have any current access, or I'd help you out).

You can mine data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for some general data, or you might try a free trial or something: here's an article on the price-setting process that briefly describes this, and the link to the Economic Research Institute has a link for a free trial to their service. I've never used them, but it may be worth a shot.

Bureau of Labor Statistics usually will get HR to pay more attention than any random website. They also have tables showing cost of living compared to a median city.

I moved from Houston to Honolulu a few years back and got a a good bump (internal promotion), but nowhere close to where the cost of loving calculators came in at. Big companies have to keep you inside certain "bands" or "brackets" for your job level, but have a lot of flexibility for adders elsewhere. There's much more flexibility than most believe there is. I focused on negotiating the adders and walked away happy. I ended up getting the following:

- Good raise on my normal base
- COLA on top of base that goes away when/if I move internally
- Better bonus plan
- Company car w/ gas card
- One time signing bonus
- Full relocation package + huge grossed up moving allowance that was basically another bonus since the company paid for EVERYTHING in the relo package.

We were also discussing a plan that would have given me a lump sum each year for 3 years at the beginning of each year to help offset higher living cost, but I oped for what I got above.

Get creative and negotiate.