What the number means,
and how we got it

Most calculators ask for a salary and tell you what is left. Jewcalc runs the other way. You describe a life: how many children and how old, how many bedrooms, which school, how observant, renting or buying, and where. The model prices that exact life in both places, then solves backwards for the pre-tax income each place would require to fund it.

That is why the two numbers are comparable. It is not “cost of living in Tel Aviv versus New York.” It is the same family, the same shul, the same number of school places, the same groceries, priced under two tax systems and two sets of prices. The output is a salary requirement, not a budget.

This is the most important thing to understand about the comparison, and the thing most people get wrong. Countries do not agree on what a taxpayer is.

The United States lets a married couple file jointly. France goes further and requires it, through the foyer fiscal, then divides household income by a number of “parts” that grows with the family before applying the ladder. The United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand do the opposite: there is no joint return at all, and each earner climbs their own ladder from the bottom with their own allowance. Israel also assesses each earner separately.

So a couple earning the same total faces genuinely different arithmetic in each place before a single price has been compared. Jewcalc encodes this per country rather than approximating it, because getting it wrong tilts the whole answer one way.

Alongside income tax, each country’s employee payroll contributions run on their own schedules, with every floor and ceiling applied per person, because that is how they are levied: US Social Security to its own wage base for each earner, Canadian CPP and CPP2 each, UK National Insurance each, and the French PASS ceiling per employee even though the income tax is joint.

Israel’s headline rates are not gentle. The ladder runs 10, 14, 20, 31, 35, 47, 50 percent, and the top rate bites at about ₪60,130 a month. What makes an Israeli family’s income tax small is not the rates. It is nekudot zikui, credit points.

A credit point is worth ₪2,904 a year and comes off tax owed, not off income. Every resident starts with 2.25 points for men, 2.75 for women, and each child adds more, weighted heavily toward the early years.

A working couple with three young children can carry more than ten points between them, which wipes out most or all of their income tax outright. Points cannot generate a refund, so they stop at zero.

What is left is Bituach Leumi and health tax, and that is what an Israeli family actually pays: 4.27% on monthly income up to ₪7,703, then 12.17% up to a ceiling of ₪51,910 a month, and nothing above. It is a real charge, it has a hard ceiling, and it is the dominant term in the Israeli figure. Anyone who says Israeli families pay no tax is looking only at the income tax line.

• Extra credit points. A new oleh gets additional points by month of residence: 1 a month for the first 12 months, 3 for the next 18, 2 for the next 12 and 1 for the last 12, 54 months in all. Each calendar year is priced on its average from your arrival month; with no arrival month set, a January arrival is assumed (1, 3, 2.5, 1.5 and 0.5 across the first five years). Modelled, and the shaded band on the chart is that window.
• The 2026 aliyah tax break. Israeli earned income is exempt up to a per-person cap of ₪600,000, ₪1,000,000, ₪1,000,000, ₪350,000, ₪150,000 over five years, for olim becoming resident in the qualifying window. Modelled, as a toggle, defaulted on. Bituach Leumi is still charged on the whole amount. What it is worth to your household
• Section 14, the ten year exemption, is deliberately NOT modelled. It covers income produced outside Israel, not a salary for work you do from Ra’anana, so Jewcalc never claims it. If your income genuinely would be produced abroad, your real Israeli tax is lower than what this shows. Working in Israel
• Buying. Purchase tax, mas rechisha, is priced at the reduced oleh rate inside the eligibility window. It sits with the down payment and closing costs in the one-time cash to close, never in the yearly figure.

Where a factor would need an assumption that decides the answer, Jewcalc leaves it out and says so, rather than burying a guess inside a total.

• Salaries. The model prices what a life costs, not what a job pays. Israeli salaries in most fields are lower than American ones, and that gap is real and is not in this number. Each city shows an income benchmark for rough context; its source may cover a different population, area or year.
• Inflation, raises and discounting. Everything is in real 2026 terms. No wage growth, no price inflation, no compounding. Only the children’s ages and the oleh taper move across the thirty years.
• Home appreciation. Modelling it turns a cost calculator into an investment forecast where the assumption picks the winner. Also excluded: rent inflation, US mortgage interest deductibility, selling costs, and the opportunity cost of a down payment.
• Pension and retirement saving. Not modelled on either side.
• Government cash benefits. Israel’s are in: Bituach Leumi’s child allowance for every child under 18 and its birth grant for a child born in Israel, and for new olim the absorption basket (sal klita) and the first-year arnona discount, each shown as a negative line in the Israeli column. Diaspora ones are not: the US Child Tax Credit, the Canada Child Benefit, UK Child Benefit and Australia’s Family Tax Benefit stay out, so a family with children is flattered on the Israeli side by that much.
• Currency risk. One FX snapshot, taken 26 Aug 2026, ships as a constant; its publisher was not recorded. The dollar is held at a flat nominal 3 shekels for readability, not at that day’s market rate. Currency moves can change the comparison, and a snapshot is a snapshot.
• Which parent earns what. Household income is split evenly between the earners you set. Testing a 70/30 split instead moves the final gap by 1 to 3%.
• City pricing for Israeli children. Israel’s cost-of-living index moves household and overlay lines only, so a Tel Aviv gan is priced exactly like a Beit Shemesh gan.
• A shorter simulation. The projection always runs thirty years. Choosing ten years re-slices the average and re-bounds the event schedule; it does not re-run the model.

That is the default, and it is a real modelling choice rather than an accident. It reflects what the same religious commitment costs in each place: in the diaspora Jewish education is bought privately, while in Israel mamlachti dati state religious schooling is publicly funded and is what the overwhelming majority of comparable families use.

Both toggles are independent and both are visible. Set Israel to private and the Israeli number rises across every schooling year; set the diaspora to public and it falls sharply. If someone thinks the default is unfair, change it in front of them. Tuition is the single largest divergence in the model, and hiding that would be the dishonest choice.

Worth admitting first, because it is the kind of thing that lands badly if someone else finds it: until an adversarial review caught it, the Israeli private toggle charged nothing at all for ages 13 to 17 while every diaspora city charged a private secondary fork. That was a one-sided error in Israel’s favour. It is fixed, and the model now refuses to start if any schooling year lacks a private option.

Because it genuinely is cheap. Mosad muchar tuition, the recognized-but-not-official schools most religious families use when they go private, is capped by the Ministry of Education, and the cap does not step up at secondary. The model carries the same figure at primary and secondary for that reason. For scale, the state system’s own fee line rises only from ₪4,875 to ₪6,000 across the same boundary.

Tel Aviv’s international schools are deliberately excluded, and they are why this gets asked: they dominate the search results at USD 12,000 to 22,000 a year. They are a different product for a different family, priced in dollars for expatriates on foreign packages, and including them would badly overstate what a religious Anglo family pays. Boarding, pnimiya, is excluded on the same reasoning: a different choice, not a dearer version of this one. Both exclusions are written on the line itself.

No, and the breakdown says so directly. Tax is one row among about fifteen. The largest contributors are day-school tuition, housing and groceries, in that order for most US cities. Turn private school off and the gap narrows a lot while remaining substantial, which tells you tuition is the biggest single term but not the only one.

Because a single year hides the shape of the thing. Costs move enormously as children age: daycare, then tuition, then the years after eighteen, then an empty nest. One-off events land in the year they happen rather than being smoothed away, so a bar mitzvah shows as a spike, not as a thirteenth of itself every year.

The headline is the average across those years, and the dotted line on the chart is exactly that. A 10-year view is one click away.

Three things, in order. Lifecycle costs in cities that were never independently researched, which are scaled from a researched city and badged Estimated. The home-quality lever, which spreads prices around each city’s median on a modelled log-normal curve, not measured listings: backing a sigma out of the four observed rent spreads gives values from 0.02 to 0.63, and the model uses 0.32, near their average, chosen rather than fitted. And the absence of salary data, which is a deliberate scope decision rather than a gap, but is the first thing a sceptical reader reaches for.

None of these are hidden. Each is badged or stated on the page where it appears.

It carries a locked snapshot of every city crossed with every scenario shape, so any change that moves a number has to be reviewed row by row before it is accepted, and every accepted change is recorded with a table showing what moved and why.

Separately, the tax parameters were audited against primary sources, HMRC, ATO, CRA, IRS, the Israel Tax Authority, Bituach Leumi and service-public.fr, by a reviewer who was not told what the code did and was asked to find errors rather than confirm them. That audit found six real gaps, all now fixed, and confirmed the rest.