Cost-of-living adjustments are pretty de rigeur for global operations which hire out of a particular social class and want consistent ability to staff locations important to them regardless of variances in local cost of living.  Consider, for example, megabanks.<p>Many software companies hire remotely and are rediscovering this.  We don&#x27;t <i>need</i>, as a function of the business, to have someone in e.g. central Tokyo and central Kansas, but it turns out that we often end up having that, or the strong possibility of that given the ex ante distribution of individual candidates.<p>Almost every distributed shop I worked with has a formal or informal discretionary bump in &quot;the formula&quot; to accommodate high-cost-of-living candidates.  It is generally closer to $10 ~ $20k rather than &quot;double.&quot;<p>American companies used to (and some foreign companies still) adjust salaries based on family size, too, which was also primarily a way to maintain access to desirable candidates for non-managerial work who had gotten an early start on family formation.  (This was subsequently illegalized in the US, AFAIK, but &quot;city in which you live&quot; is not in general a protected class in US labor law.)