Cityparity MCP Server

cityparity MCP server

Cost-of-living and quality-of-life comparison tools that AI agents can call. Point an agent at two cities and it returns take-home pay, a full cost breakdown, the equivalent salary you'd need in the target city, and the non-cash deltas people actually move for — vacation, parental leave, universal healthcare.

Hosted at https://mcp.cityparity.com/mcp. Free, no API key, rate-limited at the edge. Built on the Model Context Protocol (spec 2025-06-18, Streamable HTTP).

• Site: https://cityparity.com
• Install docs (every client): https://cityparity.com/mcp
• Machine-readable docs: https://mcp.cityparity.com/llms.txt
• OpenAPI (REST mirror): https://mcp.cityparity.com/openapi.json

What it covers

About 165 cities across 69 countries. Most calculators stop at salary and rent. cityparity prices the social safety net — childcare subsidies, parental leave, statutory vacation, universal healthcare — so "the lower-salary city actually pays more" stops being a hand-wave and becomes a number.

Tools

City slugs are kebab-case (san-francisco, hong-kong). Call list_cities first if you're unsure.

Connect

Most modern clients speak Streamable HTTP and need no install — just point them at the URL.

Claude Code

claude mcp add --transport http cityparity https://mcp.cityparity.com/mcp

Claude Desktop / ChatGPT Desktop

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cityparity": {
      "url": "https://mcp.cityparity.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop config lives at ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) or %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json (Windows). ChatGPT Desktop uses …/OpenAI/ChatGPT/mcp.json. Restart the app after editing.

Cursor

{
  "name": "cityparity",
  "url": "https://mcp.cityparity.com/mcp"
}

Codex CLI

mcpServers:
  cityparity:
    url: https://mcp.cityparity.com/mcp

Stdio-only clients (this package)

If your client can't do HTTP MCP yet, the npm package in this repo bridges stdio → HTTP:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cityparity": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "cityparity-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

The bridge (this package)

cityparity-mcp is a ~150-line stdio→HTTP forwarder. It reads line-delimited JSON-RPC from stdin, POSTs each line to the MCP endpoint, and writes the responses back to stdout (streaming SSE line by line). That's the whole job — no data, no calc engine, no secrets. Read bin/cityparity-mcp.mjs if you want to verify.

npm install -g cityparity-mcp   # or use npx, as above

Run the tests (zero dependencies, Node ≥ 20):

npm test

Methodology

The full methodology — how taxes, costs, childcare subsidies, and safety-net scoring work — is on the homepage. One thing worth flagging: RSU income is not an input. Grants are treated as source-only because they usually don't follow you across employers. If you're keeping a US employer remotely, treat the result as directional in that direction.

Privacy

Queries reach mcp.cityparity.com and nothing else. No accounts, no client-side telemetry, nothing personally identifiable logged beyond standard HTTP server logs.

License

MIT. cityparity's underlying data and calculation engine are not part of this package — this repo is the public MCP surface plus the open-source stdio bridge.

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Found a bug or want a city added? https://cityparity.com/contact/