Consulting careers roadmap: the location question at every stage

Consulting makes the location question impossible to ignore. You may live in one place, work for an entity registered in a second, and do the job in a third.

Every stage of a consulting path raises the same problem: which place are you paid against, and what does that mean once you have to live somewhere?

This is a roadmap organized around that question rather than around titles, because titles in this field vary so much between firms that they carry almost no information on their own.

What to take away

The stages, and the location question each raises

Delivery. Early on you are doing the work someone else sold and scoped. The location question here is simple and practical: where do you have to physically be, how often, and who pays for it? Travel-heavy delivery roles and desk-based ones can look identical in a job description and produce completely different lives.

Owning a workstream. You are now responsible for a piece of the engagement and for the client relationship around it. The question becomes whether you are expected to be near a particular client base, and whether the firm's structure ties your pay to where you live or to where the client is.

Selling. At the point where you are expected to bring in work, geography stops being a cost question and becomes a market question. Your network is local unless you have deliberately made it otherwise, and a move can reset it.

Owning a practice. Now you are making the location decisions for other people: where to hire, what to pay against, whether to open somewhere. The considerations below are the ones you will be applying rather than experiencing.

The skills that carry across all four stages are unremarkable and hard: scoping work honestly, saying what you do not know, writing clearly, and managing a client relationship through something going wrong. What changes between stages is the scope you are trusted with, not the underlying craft.

Why cost-of-living adjustment is not a multiplier

The standard mental model is that you take a figure and multiply it by some ratio between two places. That model breaks in at least four ways, and the breaks are large enough to change decisions.

The basket is not your basket. A cost index is built from a weighted basket of goods and services meant to represent a typical household. Your household is not typical in the ways that matter: whether you own or rent, whether you have children, whether you drive, how much you travel. Two people moving between the same two cities can experience opposite changes.

Housing dominates and behaves differently from everything else. Housing is usually the largest component and the most variable within a place. The gap between neighborhoods inside one city can exceed the gap between cities. An index that reports a single figure for a metropolitan area has averaged over exactly the variation you are about to make a decision inside.

The official US measure shows the scale. The Bureau of Economic Analysis's regional price parities by state and metro area express price levels as a percentage of the national level. In 2024 the highest states were California at 110.7, Hawaii at 110.0 and New Jersey at 108.8, and the lowest were Arkansas at 86.9 and Mississippi at 87.0. For housing rents alone the spread is far wider: California had the highest parity at 154.3 and West Virginia the lowest at 54.2.

Some costs do not move with location at all. Debt repayments, subscriptions, obligations to family elsewhere, and anything priced nationally or internationally follow you. The share of your spending that is genuinely location-sensitive is smaller than the index implies.

Tax and statutory deductions are a separate axis. They vary by jurisdiction on their own rules, which do not track cost indices. Two places with similar costs can differ substantially in what is deducted, and the direction of that difference is not predictable from the cost comparison. What applies to you depends on your residence, your employment structure, and rules that change, which is a question for the tax authority where you would live, or an adviser, and not for a general article.

The workable substitute is unglamorous: take your own actual spending, split it into what changes with location and what does not, and re-price only the first part using real listings for the specific area you would live in. That takes an afternoon and beats any index.

How firms attach pay to place

Employers use a small number of approaches, and knowing which one you are dealing with explains most of what would otherwise look arbitrary.

The questions worth asking: which of these does the firm use, what happens to my pay if I move, and is the location assignment reviewed periodically or fixed at hire? The answers are usually available and rarely volunteered.

What remote work actually changed

It changed less about pay-setting than the discussion suggests, and more about who competes for what.

What genuinely changed: the employers a person can plausibly work for widened, and the candidates an employer sees widened. Some firms shifted from hub-anchored to residence-based approaches, and that shift made a move a pay event where previously it had not been.

Location assignment became a policy that needed writing down, and therefore something you can ask about.

Pay is still set against a band attached to a level, employers still benchmark against a chosen comparison group, and that group is still mostly defined by industry and size, not geography alone.

Remote work was never going to flatten pay to one global rate. That idea assumed pay is set by the labor market alone. It is not. It is set by an employer's internal structure, informed by a market they choose to compare themselves to.

For consulting specifically, there is a further wrinkle. Client work often has its own location requirements regardless of where the firm's policy says you live. A residence-based pay policy combined with an expectation of regular client presence somewhere expensive is a combination worth identifying before accepting.

Before you move

Getting the underlying figures

For a defensible baseline use your country's statistical body. In the United States, that is the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook; elsewhere, use your national statistics office.

Consulting work spans several official categories depending on its topic, so read the occupational definitions carefully and expect to check more than one.

The closest single category for general management consulting is management analysts, who recommend ways to improve an organization's efficiency. The Handbook puts the median annual wage for management analysts at $101,860 in May 2025. They typically need at least a bachelor's degree and several years of related work experience, may travel frequently to meet with clients, and employment is projected to grow 10 percent from 2025 to 2035, with about 94,100 openings a year. That national median is the figure to hold against a location-adjusted offer at the delivery stage.

When comparing places, note that official geographic breakdowns use areas larger than the one you would live in. Any figure also carries a reference period earlier than its publication date.

The wage program explains how its areas and estimates are constructed in its overview of the survey. That page refuses an automated request while loading normally in a browser.

In short

Location affects pay through a policy your employer chose, not through a natural law, and cost of living affects you through your own spending rather than through an index. Ask which policy applies, re-price your own life rather than a basket, and treat the two as separate questions that happen to arrive together.

Related on this site: consulting careers generally, the mechanics of running a move as a process in the job search guide, and how a level becomes a range in the salaries and advancement guide. Coverage and hours drive the package in the operations pay page.

Common questions

If my firm sets pay by the office I am attached to, can I move and keep it?

Sometimes, and it depends entirely on the policy rather than on goodwill. Ask whether pay follows residence or the assigned office, and ask what happens if the assignment changes. Get the answer before the move, in writing.

Is a pay cut to move somewhere cheaper ever a good deal?

It can be, and only your own spending decides. Re-price the location-sensitive part of your life using real listings for the specific area, then compare. An index built for a metropolitan region rarely describes the street you would live on.

What if the firm expects client presence in an expensive city while paying me for a cheap one?

That is the combination worth identifying before accepting, because you carry the cost of the first and are paid for the second. Ask who pays for travel and accommodation, and how often presence is actually required.

Does remote work remove the location question?

No, it moves it. Employers still choose a policy, and the policies differ enough that the same job can be priced three ways. The question is which policy, not whether one exists.

How often can a location assignment be revisited?

Firms vary from never to annually. Ask, because a policy that cannot be revisited turns one decision into a permanent one.