About this site
Cost of Life exists to answer one question properly: if you moved there, what would be left at the end of the month?
Why it exists
Every cost-of-living site will tell you a loaf of bread costs less in Lisbon than in Amsterdam. None of that tells you what you wanted to know, because it ignores the two things that actually decide the answer: what the tax authority takes before you see your salary, and what your particular household spends rather than a generic basket.
So this site starts from your gross salary, applies the destination country’s tax model, prices your household at local prices, and shows what is left. The comparison is between what you would actually keep in two places, not between two shopping baskets.
How the numbers are made
Each figure is either measured (read from a published source), derived (anchored to a source, then adjusted in a way we state) or estimated (modelled, nothing measured behind it). Every figure on every city page carries its own label, source and date — not one confidence score for the whole city, because within a single city a transit fare can be exact while the price of a beer is a guess.
Today, 36% of a typical budget traces to a published source. That is not where it should be, and we would rather say so on the front page than quietly round it up. The disclaimer says where the remaining error is largest, and the methodology says how each category is modelled.
How it pays for itself
Advertising, and affiliate links on services people moving abroad tend to need. Both are labelled where they appear. Neither can influence a ranking: the ordering on every guide comes from the scoring code running over the dataset, and there is no field anywhere in the system that a merchant could pay to change.
We think that matters commercially and not just ethically. The only reason to use a site like this over a search engine is that you trust the number, and a number that can be bought is worth nothing to anybody.
Who publishes it
Cost of Life is published by HealthPulse LLC, established in California. Reach us at perucci6@yahoo.com.
Found something wrong? The corrections page goes straight into the work queue, and a figure you correct is one the next reader gets right.