City comparisons you can inspect.
Compare Living Cost is a relocation-planning tool for comparing major cities with visible assumptions, source-linked cost categories and explicit uncertainty. The goal is not to produce a mysterious city score; it is to show which recurring costs are driving a comparison and how strong the underlying evidence is.
What the site models
The headline model represents one adult renting alone in a long-term, unfurnished one-bedroom home in a non-prime but transit-connected area, with a moderate non-luxury lifestyle, no car and no children. The six core categories are rent, utilities/connectivity, groceries, eating out, public transit and household/personal essentials.
Every current city page publishes low, midpoint and high anchors for those six categories. The site then uses the model described on the Methodology page to form a planning range. Healthcare, childcare, taxes, savings, car ownership and other household-specific costs are kept separate rather than quietly folded into the headline total.
Coverage today
The current V7.3 build covers 47 cities. All 47 retain the six-category planning model, but evidence strength is disclosed component by component: direct component evidence, broad calibration evidence, or source-linked model anchors. Fifteen research-stage cities remain browsable but are held out of the search sitemap until their core evidence is stronger.
How evidence is handled
Local-currency values are canonical. Government statistics, public agencies, regulated utilities, transparent market indexes and other identifiable sources are linked in the site data and city pages. When a source does not exactly match the model persona, the derivation records document the normalization and confidence is kept conservative. Cities with material limitations are marked PROVISIONAL rather than presented with false precision.
The public source registry, metric registry, core derivation ledger and detail derivation ledger are deliberately exposed from the Methodology page. That means the site can be audited at the record level instead of asking readers to trust a single unexplained index value.
What Compare Living Cost does not claim
The model is not a personal financial plan, a salary promise, a rent quote or a quality-of-life ranking. A citywide planning midpoint cannot capture every neighbourhood, lease, household size or lifestyle. Currency conversion changes the display currency but does not make the underlying local estimate more precise.
Why some city pages are deeper than others
Detailed cost-of-living data are uneven around the world. Some places have current official rent, transport, household-spending, childcare, health, tax and earnings records that line up cleanly with the site schema. Others require broader proxies or have older surveys. The site therefore allows coverage depth to differ by city instead of forcing every page to look equally complete.
Use the model as a starting point
A useful workflow is to compare two cities, inspect the categories creating the difference, check each city page for its range and confidence, and then replace the generic model assumptions with your own housing, commuting and household choices. For the exact model rules and public data files, see the methodology.
Read the methodology and source policy · Browse all cities · Contact