Press Kit

Our data

Livingcost is a database with information on prices and cost of living in 9294 cities in 197 countries. The data is partly crowdsourced by our users plus aggregated from public sources: rental websites, chain grocery stores, etc. The cost of living is calculated as a consumer basket to maintain a moderate developed-country lifestyle. For some developing countries sustaining such a lifestyle means a higher cost of living compared to locals.

We collect data for cities. Prices shown for countries are population-weighted means of their cities.

In our "Best places to live" ranking we use 13 indicators. 7 indicators are country-specific:

1. Human Freedom Index (The Cato Institute)
2. Gross Domestic Product per capita (The World Bank)
3. GDP per capita based on purchasing power parity (The World Bank)
4. Life expectancy (The World Bank)
5. Homicide rate (WHO, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime)
6. Mortality caused by road traffic injury (The World Bank)
7. Corruption Perceptions Index (transparency.org)

6 indicators are city-specific:

1. Average salary (our data)
2. Average salary divided by cost of living (our data)
3. Cost of living (our data)
4. Annual average air quality (iqair.com)
5. Distance adjusted airports score (ourairports.com)
6. Distance adjusted universities score (edurank.org)