Cost of Living Index by Country 2024 – Numbeo

This anecdotally back ups what I was seeing when I visited the US.<p>Groceries and food (in general) was surprisingly more expensive in New Hampshire and Vermont than Calgary where I live (which is not a low COL area in Canada). I cannot understand how American fruit costs more in the US than they did back home (when including the exchange rate). I was not visiting a premium grocery store (it was a Price Chopper near a Tesla Charger near a small town in NH.)<p>This generally surprised me because the Canadian &quot;online left&quot; is organizing protests about the cost of food, while I don&#x27;t see anything similar in the US.

Living in France, i&#x27;m pretty surprised they manage to find a &quot;cost of living index&quot; being _lower_ now than in 2018.<p>Sure, things have recessed from the highs of 2022 &#x2F; 2023, but the idea of a &quot;groceries index&quot; that does not reflect how is has changed to, ahem, shop for groceries is weird.

When sorting by Rent Index, the US looks like a massive outlier at 45. Everywhere else over 40 is either a tiny island nation&#x2F;territory or famously idiosyncratic (Switzerland, Iceland, UAE). The other Anglosphere giants, Canada and Australia, come in very high as well at 36.<p>I would have expected the most desirable Western European nations to lead, but most of those are in the 20&#x27;s. Those nations tend to have more regulation and much less space to develop, yet they&#x27;ve managed to keep their rents meaningfully lower despite having a comparable cost of living overall.<p>&gt; Rent Index: This index estimates the prices of renting apartments in a city compared to New York City. If the Rent Index is 80, it suggests that the average rental prices in that city are approximately 20% lower than those in New York City.

IMO depending on what question you&#x27;re looking to answer using this page, typically some variant of &quot;how expensive is my country relative to others&quot;, it would probably be useful to check out the purchasing power adjusted index (also present on the page)

Japan offers insane value right now for anyone who wants to spend some months abroad.

Eastern Europe is where it is at. Ukraine is super cheap and a really beautiful place, requires a little work to get there but not to bad. Hotels are cheap and really good food and just awesome. Planning to go again this summer.

has anyone done a simple merging of the Cost of living and quality of living to get the top 10 countries with the lowest cost of living but relatively highest quality of living?

Where&#x27;s the &quot;quality of life&quot; or &quot;corruption level&quot; index on that table? Heck, what about measurable things like &quot;average air quality&quot;.

They should publish their own inflation index and compare it with the &quot;official&quot; numbers published by the governemnt

India offers remarkable value in all listed indexes except the Local Purchasing Power Index.

The relative ranking of the US has changed drastically within the past decade. I wonder why. It seems like many factors that we blame for rising costs - inflation, supply-chain issues - would affect other countries as well.

being from a country on the bottom side of the list living on one from the top, it seems to roughly add up from my experience. although it is more accurate for the more expensive parts of each country.<p>when living in a cheaper country to live compared to a more expensive one, there is a very different split between rent and other expense in terms of having a comparable standard of living.

Australia should be #1. it is bonkers here right now. US is expensive than AU? hell no.

I wish they did a ratio on quality of life over cost of life.<p>They seem to have both data sets there

What&#x27;s the multiplier for index to convert to dollar?