Traffic woes and the cost of living are the big things that put people off moving cities for a new job, but University of Auckland postdoctoral research fellow Dr Alexander Raichev and his collaborator Saeid Adli have a developed a new tool that at least lets you know what you’re in for.

The Affordability in New Zealand application balances your income against your annual gross income, the rent you’ll pay, how far you’ll have to travel, parking costs and running your vehicles.

You can then click on maps of Auckland and Wellington to see how different parts of the city are.

The pair pulled data from various sources including median gross annual incomes of Aucklanders and Wellingtonians from Statistics New Zealand and 2013 Census data on rents.

You’ll need to take the commute times with a grain of salt if you work standard hours, as they were calculated in traffic-free conditions. They were based on the quickest path using a street network, via ArcGIS or the Google Maps API.

There’s more here about the data and code Raichev and Adli used.