Remember Houston is a bit of a weird place for salaries because it's such an oil city. Starting salaries for new grads in a major oil company can be $100k. Due to that the salary conversation about Houston is often more complicated than some other cities.

We should be ok then??

That's a very subjective question. It's a better salary than a lot have, low for oil.

Yes, the starting salaries in the O&G sector are from $80k to 100k. But that doesn't mean you can live on it, and in areas of EC and Woodlands, houses run $4k a month to rent. Many have this salary starting out because they are still at home, or sharing flats with mates, or have a spouse working as well.

My first reaction at the salary was it was low for a family to do well here, and knocks one out of the better school districts unless ready for a hefty mortgage. And start up costs moving here are high, as you need to buy cars, set up utilities, etc.

That calculator is a take-home pay calculator, not a detailed tax calculator. This means when it talks about voluntary deductions, it's talking about voluntary deductions from income at source, not about the details of the tax calculation.

Use this Houston homes, Houston Open Houses, and New Houston Listings - HAR.com - HAR.com to get an idea of what you could get for your money. I would suggest no more than $2k/month, and that will still be about 1/3 or more of your take home pay. I did a search on Humble and it found 29 homes with 4 bedrooms or more for less than 2k. That will include property taxes, which are another major tax here. The rest of the taxes can be got with any website that will give you an approx. federal calculation.

I work in oil and gas. We pay petrotechnical new grads between $100k-$110k typically. We also have people who are not petrotechs and have been working for 10 years on between $80k-$100k. As a result, Houston is skewed in salary. Median or average doesn't mean much, the distribution is much wider than "normal". There are a LOT of people taking in $500k a year or more when you add in base, bonus, shares etc.