Disclaimer

Every price on this site carries one of three labels, and they are not decoration:

• Measured — taken directly from a published source with no modelling in between. A transit fare read off the operator’s own tariff page is measured.
• Derived — anchored to a real measurement, then adjusted. The adjustment is always stated. A rent anchored to the Zillow index and then split across bedroom counts using census housing-mix ratios is derived: the level is real, the split is ours.
• Estimated — modelled from regional relationships and public statistics. Nobody measured it. This is the majority of the dataset today.

Hover or tap any figure on a city page to see its label, its source and the date it was obtained. The methodology page explains how each category is modelled.

Not all estimates are equally wrong. In rough order of how much you should distrust them:

• Rent is the biggest line in almost every budget and the most variable within a city. The difference between two streets can exceed the difference between two countries. Treat an unsourced rent as an order of magnitude, not a price.
• Tax is modelled for a single filer with no dependants, no allowances beyond the standard ones, no regional variation and no treaty relief. Real tax bills diverge from this routinely, and sometimes enormously.
• Health cover varies with age and pre-existing conditions by multiples, which no single figure can represent.
• Groceries and eating out are the most stable estimates here, because price-level statistics for them are published and comparable across countries.

Use an authoritative source, not us, when the answer decides money or status:

• a tax position — use the national revenue authority or an accountant in that country;
• a visa or residence permit — use the relevant immigration authority;
• a lease or a purchase — use current listings for the actual neighbourhood;
• health cover — use a quote for your own age and history;
• a salary negotiation — use local market data as well as our conversion.

Our figures are built for comparison between cities. They are much better at “Lisbon is cheaper than Amsterdam, by roughly this much” than at “you will spend exactly this in Lisbon”.

Prices are converted to your chosen currency at a rate refreshed automatically; the rate date is shown with the figure. Exchange rates move, source statistics are published with a lag, and a figure marked as of a date last year is telling you it is a year old rather than pretending to be current.

Guides such as “best cities for remote workers” rank cities by running the same scoring code over the same dataset. Where the underlying figures are estimates, the ranking inherits that uncertainty — a ranking built on modelled numbers is a modelled ranking. Each guide states the grounding of the cities it ranks.

No city pays for a position, and no advertiser or affiliate partner can influence one.

If you live somewhere we cover and a figure is wrong, telling us is the single most useful thing you can do for the next reader. Use the corrections page, which takes about thirty seconds and does not need an account.