Data Sources & Attribution
Price data is aggregated from public, crowdsourced consumer-price databases; currency rates come from a free public FX feed refreshed daily and cached at the edge.
Price data
Per-city prices are aggregated from public, crowdsourced consumer-price databases. Each city contributes 55 representative items across 10 categories; medians are normalized to USD before display. We sanity-check outliers and exclude cities where the underlying basket is missing core items (rent or utilities).
Currency conversion
The currency switcher uses daily exchange rates refreshed via a scheduled cron trigger from a free public FX API and cached at the edge.
Reuse & licensing
Our compiled dataset and derived metrics (cost-of-living index, monthly cost estimates, salary calculator outputs) are made available under CC BY-NC 4.0. If you reuse the data, please credit AverageCostOfLiving with a link.
How the basket is computed
The single-person monthly basket combines rent for a 1-bedroom apartment, basic utilities (electricity, water, heating, internet, mobile), a monthly public-transport pass, groceries for one person, and a small dining-out budget — all in USD.
The cost-of-living index anchors New York City at 100. A value of 50 means roughly half the cost of the NYC basket; 120 means 20% more. Family and student estimates apply fixed multipliers to the single-person basket.
Frequently asked questions
- Where does the price data come from?
- Public, crowdsourced consumer-price databases. We aggregate and normalize the data to USD before display.
- Where do the currency rates come from?
- A free public FX API, refreshed on a daily cron schedule and cached at the edge.
- What is the license for this data?
- Our compiled dataset and derived metrics are released under CC BY-NC 4.0. Please credit AverageCostOfLiving with a link if you reuse the data.