Geographic Arbitrage

Moving somewhere cheaper only pays if your income does not fall by more than the rent does. This table settles that question for 190 cities with one number: the hours you must work each month to cover survival, at the local median wage.

Last updated: 2026-08-11

The number that actually decides where you can afford to live

Cost-of-living comparisons are usually published as index numbers — city A is 62% of city B — which tells you nothing on its own, because your income moved when you did. What decides whether a place is affordable is the ratio: how much of your working life it costs to simply stay alive there.

So that is what this table measures. For each of 190 cities it takes the local median wage and the local cost of a bare survival month, and reports one figure: the hours you must work in a month to cover survival. A full-time month is about 173 hours. Everything below that line is time you keep; anything above it means the median earner cannot cover survival on one full-time job.

What the data says

• The spread is enormous. In Daegu the median earner covers a survival month in 15.5 hours. In Mumbai the same calculation comes to 283.9 hours — more than 18× as much of their life for the same thing.
• The median city is Osaka, at 42.3 hours — about 24% of a full-time month.
• In 27 cities a minimum-wage worker cannot cover survival in a full-time month at all — more than 173 hours of work needed. In 5 cities the median earner cannot either (Bangkok, Phuket, Denpasar, Jakarta, Mumbai). These are two separate lists that overlap in 3: a city can fail one test and pass the other. That is not a cheap city; that is a city where the published wage does not reach the published cost of living.
• In 3 cities the minimum-wage column looks better than the median one (Bangalore, Denpasar, Jakarta). That is not a typo and not a good sign: it means the statutory minimum sits above the measured median wage in the sources behind those rows — usually a national minimum set against a city median drawn from a different survey. Treat both figures there as weak, and read the caveats below before quoting either.
• Cheap and affordable are different things. The lowest survival costs in the table are not in the easiest cities — a low cost of living paired with a lower local wage buys you less free time, not more. Sorting by price alone gets this exactly backwards.

How each number is built

Every figure below comes from the same dataset that powers the Purchasing Power view inside WealthMap. The method matters more than the ranking, so here it is in full:

• Survival cost = what it costs one ordinary adult, arriving with no family, no employer and no local network, to cover staying alive at public market prices: a room in a shared flat (a three-bedroom outside the centre, divided by three), utilities and broadband divided by three, a mobile plan, a transit pass, and groceries at roughly 2,100 kcal/day — plus that country’s out-of-pocket healthcare share (World Bank). It is deliberately the floor, not a comfortable life: no restaurants, no car, no childcare, living alone nowhere in it.
• Wages are gross (before income tax and social contributions) and are the local median where a median exists. Take-home pay is lower everywhere, and by very different amounts — so read the table as a comparison between cities, not as your budget.
• Hourly, not annual. Annual pay is divided by that country’s actual working hours — public holidays and a statutory week that ranges from 35 to 48 hours — never a flat 2,080. A 48-hour-week country compared on a 40-hour assumption comes out about 20% too rich.
• One reference year (2025) for every row. Figures that were originally from another year are carried forward with that country’s nominal wage index. Mixing a 2022 wage with a 2025 rent is the single most common way these comparisons go wrong, and it is invisible in the result.
• Minimum wage is the statutory rate at city, state or national level, held in the period the law actually sets it in (hourly, daily or monthly). Where a country has no statutory minimum, the figure is estimated and marked est. in the table.
• Everything is converted to USD so the columns can be compared at all. Inside the app the same table is shown in whichever settlement currency you pick, at live rates.
• No gaps are filled by guessing. Where a figure has no source it is dropped, not estimated — which is why a city you expect may be missing.

What this cannot tell you

It is a floor for one adult, on gross pay, at national tax-blind figures. It does not know your visa, your profession’s local pay, your family, or whether you keep earning a foreign salary after you move — which is the case that changes the arithmetic completely. Someone paid remotely in one currency and living in another is not on this table at all; they are combining the wage column of one city with the survival column of another. That gap is the whole idea of geographic arbitrage, and it is exactly the calculation the app does with your real numbers rather than the median stranger’s.

All 190 cities, ranked

Sorted by hours of work per month needed to cover survival at the local median wage — fewest first. Reference year 2025; wages gross; USD.

Doing this with your own numbers

A median is a stranger. The table above is the map; your position on it depends on what you actually earn and actually spend. Inside WealthMap the same dataset sits behind the Purchasing Power view, where you compare cities against your income and your spending, in your own settlement currency — alongside your net worth, your cash-flow forecast, and your runway (how long your money lasts at your current spend).

It is free to start and needs no bank connection. See Pricing for the plan ladder, the Glossary for the terms used here, or read how the multi-currency side works in tracking net worth across currencies.

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