How much do you need to earn to live comfortably in Brighton and Hove?

If it often feels like your hard-earned wages never stretch far enough, you might think it’s because you’re blowing your budget unnecessarily - but it could really be the cost of living in your city that’s behind your financial woes.

How to find out? A new online tool that reveals how much money Britons should be earning in postcodes across the country to realistically live ‘comfortable’ lives may have the answer.

The tool shows how much you’d need to earn per hour to rent in that postcode (based on a single person working a 37.5 hour week and rent being 35 per cent of income).

Brightonians living in BN1 will need to earn £27.33 an hour to live comfortably, and £27.07 in BN2. Hove residents in BN3 need to earn £24.90, and the figure falls to £23.37 in the Portslade postcode BN41.

Highlighting the huge difference between the cheapest and most expensive areas, the online tool tells us that the cost of living comfortably in Britain varies dramatically from one postcode to another.

For example, Bradford residents can live a ‘comfortable life’ on earnings of just £8,98 per hour, Durhamites need to be bringing in £9.47 to do likewise, and those living in Sunderland have to make £11.29.

Pack your bags and relocate to the big smoke of London, however, and you’d need to be earning £54.54 per hour to live comfortably, while for those residing in Edinburgh, an hourly rate of £21.15 is what’s required.

The interactive widget, created by the team at www.web-blinds.com, analysed renting data from all 2,650 UK postcodes.

Users are asked to input the first half of a postcode or the name of a city and are then taken to a map of their chosen area that features a postcode-by-postcode breakdown of how much money they’d need to earn per hour to realistically live a ‘comfortable’ life, based on the recommendation from Shelter that rent should be no more than 35 per cent of tenant’s income.

Spokesperson for www.web-blinds.com, Kirsty O’Sullivan, said: “The most expensive postcodes and cities make for eye-watering reading, but there are still plenty of affordable gems out there for renters. They just might have to look outside of the capital for them.”

The interactive tool can be found here.