What life costs, city by city
Prices, rents, salaries and a livability score for 6,532 cities. Every index is measured against New York, where it reads 100.
- Cities with prices
- 6,532
- Cities indexed
- 11,193
- Countries
- 250
- Index rebuilt
- 25 Sept 2026
Find your place
Tell us who is moving, what you earn and what matters to you. We rank cities by how well they fit and work out your take-home pay in each, after tax.
Find your placeFour questions
- 1Who is moving
- 2What you earn
- 3What matters to you
- 4Where you would go
World map of livability
Arrow keys move between the cities in view, Enter opens one, plus and minus zoom, zero resets. The same places are listed in the rankings below the map.
5 classes, split at 47, 55, 61, 67.
Seven domain scores, weighted: purchasing power 25, safety 20, health care 15, climate 10, air 10, connectivity 10, cost 10. Ranked among high-confidence cities.
Rankings at a glance
Open the full rankingsBest value big cities
Lowest cost of living plus rent among cities of a million people or more, one per country. New York = 100.
- 1DhanbadIndia4.3
- 2KhulnaBangladesh4.9
- 3TabrizIran5.8
- 4IbadanNigeria5.9
- 5GujranwalaPakistan6.1
- 6AlexandriaEgypt6.5
- 7XianyangChina7.0
- 8HueVietnam7.2
Highest livability
Seven domain scores, weighted. Ranked among high-confidence cities (six or more domains, twenty or more contributors), one per country.
- 1Qingdao, ShandongChina77
- 2HaifaIsrael76
- 3TaipeiTaiwan75
- 4Zaragoza (Saragossa)Spain72
- 5SeoulSouth Korea72
- 6AarhusDenmark72
- 7FukuokaJapan72
- 8GenevaSwitzerland71
Cleanest air
Air-quality score from the last 30 days of readings, 0-100, 100 at the cleanest; one per country.
- 1KamsarGuinea100
- 2QūchānIran100
- 3TampereFinland100
- 4JacareíBrazil100
- 5LeonSpain100
- 6Da LatVietnam100
- 7Shangri-LaChina100
- 8HagatnaGuam100
Fastest internet
Median fixed broadband download in Mbps (Speedtest Global Index), one city per country.
- 1SingaporeSingapore463
- 2ValparaisoChile417
- 3Abu DhabiUnited Arab Emirates409
- 4LyonFrance365
- 5Hong KongHong Kong SAR China362
- 6HaifaIsrael357
- 7BangkokThailand322
- 8MacaoMacao SAR China322
How the index is made
Collect
Thirteen public sources are scraped on their own schedules: Numbeo prices and surveys, GeoNames, Open-Meteo, NASA POWER, Speedtest, the World Bank and three tax references.
Transform
Twenty-one SQL transforms clean, geocode and join them into one row per city and one per country, keyed to the same place names and codes.
Score
Seven domain scores are weighted into livability, and every place carries a confidence tier from how much data stands behind it.
Sources and method
What each number means and where it comes from.
Prices are the median of the latest month of Numbeo contributions for each city, in US dollars. Indices compare a city with New York, which is 100: a cost index of 62 means the same basket costs 62% of what it costs in New York.
Domain scores are percentiles among the cities that have that data, so a city can move when others change. Every city shows how many contributors stand behind its prices and a confidence tier: high needs six or more domains and at least twenty contributors, and only high-confidence cities are given a livability rank. The weights are purchasing power 25, safety 20, health care 15, climate 10, air 10, connectivity 10 and cost 10.
Index rebuilt 25 Sept 2026. The index is recomputed every morning from the tables below.
- NumbeoPrices, rents and salaries from contributor surveys, plus property, crime and quality-of-life indices.Refreshed 25 Sept 2026
- GeoNamesCity names, coordinates, population and time zones.Refreshed 24 Sept 2026
- Open-MeteoDaily air quality for every reference city.Refreshed 25 Sept 2026
- NASA POWERClimate normals: temperature, rain, humidity and sunshine by month.Refreshed 24 Sept 2026
- Speedtest Global IndexMedian fixed and mobile internet speeds.Refreshed 24 Sept 2026
- World BankGDP, growth, unemployment, inflation, life expectancy, population and homicide rates.Refreshed 24 Sept 2026
- PwC, Trading Economics and WikipediaIncome, corporate, sales and capital-gains tax rates.Refreshed 24 Sept 2026