About & Data Methodology

What is LivingCost?

LivingCost helps people preparing to relocate, study, work remotely or emigrate compare the cost of living between cities, item by item. All features are free and require no account.

Data collection & normalization

Prices come from our own curated dataset plus community reports. Every price is stored normalized to US dollars. City indexes are weighted category averages (rent 30%, groceries 25%, dining 15%, transport 10%, telecom 10%, utilities 10%) scaled so that New York = 100.

Exchange rates

Displayed prices are converted from USD using batch-updated exchange rates. The rate date is always shown next to converted amounts. We do not use live exchange-rate feeds.

Community reports

Anyone can report a price without signing in. Reports are validated automatically: values are converted to USD, outliers beyond ±60% of the current average are rejected, and once at least 3 accepted reports accumulate for an item they are merged into the average.

Privacy

We store no personal data with reports. Only a hashed IP is kept for rate limiting and deleted after 30 days.