Digital Nomads

Not every country in the world. Taiwan is missing.

How is Denmark $4,100?! Sure life is expensive here, but that's only true if you expect to live in a very nice hotel. A more than decent apartment in Copenhagen is maybe $1,500 per month. Waaay less anywhere else in the country.

No way Vietnam is more expensive than Cambodia, everything is way cheaper in the former.

I live in Mozambique. My husband and I (both expats) live really comfortably and our monthly budget is $900.

$2000 is ridiculous.

Your price for Bhutan is way off since it costs $200/day just to be in the country for foreigners

Cuba at nearly $5k seems inaccurate.

Offical exchange rate is 24:1 USD. But real life was 80 last time I heard. This may be the problem.

I certainly would not expect Thailand to be more expensive than Philippines.

Certainly lots of locals in PH are living in $100 a month apartments, but if you want AC and Internet you are spending significantly more. BGC, Makati, Cebu City where most DN would stay seem much more expensive than BKK or Chaing Mai.

Similar story for Thai vs Pinoy food.

there are too many factors for this information to be useful on its own.

I compare to my own living experiences in some of the mentioned countries and I actually agree with almost all of them. Of course the majority of the expenses are driven by the cost of rental!

Mexico is more expensive than Chile?? In my experience, Chile and Uruguay are the most expensive countries in Latin America. If your data from Mexico is just Mexico City or beachtowns, then maybe. But Santiago has basically European city prices and Patagonia even more expensive.

I have to agree with others here, sorry this isn’t a constructive take but I’m not buying some of these numbers. For instance Nepal is one of the cheapest places in the world but it’s far down the list and it’s right next to Jordan, which I found to be a bit expensive (as in, comparable to EU). Portugal is also known to be cheaper than Spain, and Ethiopia much cheaper than both, in my experiences (and also of people I know in the nomad community). Maybe the lifestyle and location variables are screwing with it… I also think there’s a difference between a business expat and a DN; with expat assignments they really spend a ton more than they should in developing countries.

Also there is a similar service to this called NomadList; they break it down by city and also include a bunch of other really helpful data around safety, internet speeds, English literacy, and a ton of other data points.

Also as an aside, your website has a lot of ads; as someone who loves travel blogs I would be so annoyed and exit immediately.

Where has this data come from? It seems to be of with a lot of countries. You do know Reddit doesn’t give a follow link? You also won’t get any traffic with misinformation.

I've been living in indonesia and malaysia. My experience in indonesia is a bit higher than that for jakarta greater area and special region of yogyakarta

But for malaysia, mine is much less than that unless you rent in KL sentral

Great work! But I'm thinking that a list based on city/area would probably be more accurate/useful. Especially in countries like Thailand, Indonesia, USA etc. that have massive cost differences between areas. Thoughts?

The Singapore number is wrong. That’s way too far from median income, however maybe true if you are a nomad since legally SG doesn’t allow short term rental so you need to resort to hotels alike which can cost ballpark 3k ish USD per month

For expat the more “accurate” number is around 2.5k USD. Cost of living actually is lower in Singapore than in the States or Western Europe. You can live a good life with good QoL at 1k USD for food and entertainment as long as you don’t spend too much on booze or cigs.

you're retarded, or on Adderall.

I see houses for sale in Portugal for €10,000 or €15,000.

Admittedly pretty shabby ones - you can get something pretty sound and merely in need of redecorating for €30,000 or €40,000.

There are some sever inaccuracies here from my personal experience

It’s crazy how much work people put into Reddit posts. You’re a legend. This is amazing.

Numbeo would be helpful as a resource for this effort.

Thailand is well off, Bangkok you can still get a great condo near the center for ~25K THB / month, that's about 700 USD. Even short term in high season will still only be about $1000 USD. Pretty much just gets cheaper from there if you go outside of BKK and off season. Unless you're going to expensive bars and restaurants frequently there is no way you'll hit 2000+ USD per month.

Seem far fetch. What are the base ?

Malaysia is a country with higher cost of life than Thailand and yet, the expat cost is lower ? The value in Brunei is totally off too.

Australia, I lived there with way lower budget.

Figure is also on the high side for France.

What year does this data come from? Is this for a single person or family of 4?

You need to check bahrain and saudi arabia

How did you calculate thailand? $2000+ seems super expensive unless you want a mansion.

Decent rent is as low as $200 a month, food is less than $10 a week, transport is dirt cheap too

Mexico is way off as well, people here live with a minimum wage of ~$400 a month, decently you can live with $800-$1.5k, luxurious would be anywhere $2k+ (in general mexico, tourist areas and some areas of big cities can be US level expensive, then again, there you need $4-5k+ to live in)

Hey I know you're getting some flack about the actual dollar numbers, but I appreciate efforts like this. There's no possible way to encompass everyone's unique situation but this can be one data point helping someone to narrow down certain countries/regions. I appreciate the work.

Thought #2: Monaco LOL. We're spending the month in Cannes and are making a day trip there next week. Crazy!

As someone who lives in Vietnam, this list is completely wrong lol

This is wildly inaccurate

I wonder if Nomads can provide their own estimation of places they have lived in and the cost of living. Everyone has different expenses for example, people may spend more on drinking which may drive your costs up. But the basics like Food, accomodation, internet can help determine this.

For me :

India (Goa): Beach, chilled lifestyle- $1000/ month. Inlcludes stay on a sharing basis, and coffee houses and internet costs. Can go up and down on expenses like Rent and stuff. If you take long term lease like 6 months. Can be even lower.

Sri Lanka ( Colombo+ Galle) - $1150/ month. Includes stay, scooter, surf board rentals, internet. Internet can be wonky.

Kazakhistan + Uzbekistan- $1500/ month. Includes stay, internet, going out. Not taken in to expenses like train rides and site seeing. But you can take another $150 for this.

Bhutan- Way too expensive for what it provides. Visa cost are way too high.

Thailand is a mixed bag- Can be anywhere between $1200 to $1500/-

Good luck living in Sydney (Australia) for that cost. You'd be lucky to exist in a tent in a garbage dump for that cost

been looking at Ecuador

what does the calculation include? For example, 1490 for Moldova seems too high, barely anyone earns even half of this in the country. And you can rent a whole apartment for 200-300$ per month in the capital, so can easily live comfortably for 700-800$ /month.

Meh.

I’m not saying it’s entirely inaccurate, but it’s not entirely accurate nor very useful either.

Take Italy for instance. Where you live will change your cost dramatically, and my family is certainly not spending that much money, or anything closer to that, every month. Even factoring in rent, you won’t get this figure probably anyway south of Rome. So location if a pretty major factor.

Same for the UK. If you live in London, expenses could be very well above what stated, but go anywhere else and the numbers go down dramatically.

Czech Republic seems also pretty high, compared to the cost of living, and Franche seems way to low, especially when it’s lower than Italy.

And I get that these numbers are the average, but it’s skewing the data way too much, probably because doing a simple average calculation will not give a correct representation of each country.

Unfortunately, most of these numbers make 0 sense. A for effort though.

hmm good work. I dont know how you calculated those but in many governmental statistics, they have average and meidan expenses people pay per year or month. maybe you could use that for better accuracy

basically none of this is right based on any of the countries i've been in in my 15 years of nomading.

Yeah nah, Slovakia with 1870$? With that kind of money you can live well above average, nice appartment, going out often, etc. Average person has to live off of +-800 euro netto. Sorry, the numbers seem off.

Papa New Guinea is that expensive ???

Definitely costs more than that to live here in Australia - especially near a major city.

Two questions: would you say these numbers render a roughly equivalent lifestyle across the board?

And if so: I currently live on less than half of what you listed for the US. Would living on 50% of your average in other countries render me about the same lifestyle I currently have?

Obviously the second question is more subjective, but I’m curious what your opinion is on that.

Just spent 4 months living in Ghana - I assume lots of your data points were in Accra, at $1846. But depending on lifestyle factors (eating at western restaurants, luxury accommodation, amount of travel) it could also be way higher.

God's work. But I believe that Bhutan requires $100ish per day for visa/guide, which moves it significantly.

Nice work! Bangladesh it is then.

This just tells me that on the average British salary, I couldn’t live in at least half of the world.