A cost of living comparison sets what you spend now against what the same life would cost somewhere else, in one currency. Enter what you spend now, and what it costs where you're going, and see the two side by side.
This puts your actual monthly spend against typical spend in another country. That is the right comparison for "what would my life cost there" - but it is not like-for-like, and the difference matters. If you eat out five nights a week where you are now and compare against a country's typical figure, the gap will flatter the destination. The honest reading is: this shows how your current lifestyle costs compare, not what you would spend after adapting to local habits.
Only two cities below come pre-filled with city-level data: Budapest and Tbilisi. Those are the ones with a genuine official statistical index behind them - Hungary's KSH (published openly under CC BY 4.0) and Georgia's Geostat - which we can cite and you can verify.
Every other country shows a World Bank country-level estimate instead - a real, sourced number, just not city-specific. The figures circulating online for city-level costs elsewhere come from crowdsourced sites whose terms do not permit reuse in a tool like this, and several rest on very thin samples - one popular destination's numbers are built on 48 contributors. Publishing those specific figures would mean either breaching someone's licence or presenting a small poll as though it were data. Neither is worth doing for the sake of a pre-filled box.
So the honest version is this: bring your own numbers for city-specific precision. A local rental portal, a landlord, someone already living there, or a week of your own receipts will all beat both the crowdsourced aggregates and the country-level estimate - and unlike either, they describe the life you would actually be living.
Budapest and Tbilisi carry figures from an official statistical index, named directly - KSH-ingatlan.com for Hungary, Geostat for Georgia. Every other country runs on a different kind of number: purchasing power parity, published by the World Bank.
It's worth understanding what that actually means, because it isn't the same as a currency exchange rate. An exchange rate just converts one currency into another - it says nothing about what that money actually buys once you're there. Purchasing power parity asks the real question instead: if you swapped your money and bought the same everyday basket of goods, would you spend more or less than you do at home? A country can have a strong currency and still be expensive, or a weak one and still be cheap - PPP is what actually answers whether your money goes further, not the exchange rate alone. To see the plain exchange rate on its own, separate from purchasing power, the currency converter shows that directly.
The estimate itself: that percentage is applied to average US spending for a two-person household across the whole basket the World Bank measures - not just Rent through Mobile+internet, but Other too (health, education, recreation, and the rest) - then converted at today's exchange rate. What "rent" and "Other" actually mean here: a national housing average across owned and rented homes of every size, not a specific apartment or bedroom count. Neither matches your exact circumstances by design - this is a broad economic comparison for two people, not a listing-by-listing one, and won't match a single traveler's costs directly.
The foreigner price gap is real. In Da Nang the same one-bedroom lists at roughly 7-9 million VND (about $270-$340) on local rental platforms and 14-19 million VND (about $530-$720) on foreigner-facing sites, current as of August 2026 exchange rates. Similar channel premiums are widely reported in Bali, Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City, though only Da Nang has been rigorously documented. Where you search changes what you pay.
Rent is the whole game. It is usually 30-50% of the total and varies far more by location than anything else. A comparison that leaves rent out isn't a cost-of-living comparison. If you want to go deeper on housing specifically - is this actual listing good value per square metre against your current place - the property comparator does that properly.
There is no reference figure for groceries. The August 2026 research pass did not find comparable per-country grocery data across all twelve destinations, and inventing one would have been worse than leaving it out. You can still enter your own grocery spend - it counts toward your total - but the destination column shows a gap rather than a number. It will be filled when there is something honest to fill it with.
Compare the same categories - rent, groceries, transport, utilities - in a single currency, using your own actual spending rather than a national average. Housing is usually 30-50% of the total and varies far more by location than anything else.
It depends entirely on the source. Official statistical indices are dependable; crowdsourced figures can rest on very few contributors. This tool only publishes figures from named official sources and says plainly where none exist.
The difference between what your money is nominally worth and what it actually buys. A $100 salary bump means nothing if prices there are 30% higher - purchasing power parity adjusts for that gap, which a plain currency conversion can't.