Decision intelligence for where to live

Why this exists

Most cost-of-living tools answer the wrong question. They tell you that Lisbon is "65% as expensive as New York" without telling you what gross salary you actually need to live there given Portuguese tax rates, your lifestyle tier, and how many people you're feeding. They show monthly costs in dollars when you'd be paid in euros.

Mundevo computes the gross salary required at four lifestyle tiers (frugal, balanced, comfortable, premium) across 104 cities in 49 countries, with each country's effective payroll deduction rate applied to convert net-to-gross. It compares any two cities, builds country-to-country relocation corridors, and surfaces side-by-side decision rubrics across cost, quality of life, remote-work infrastructure, and healthcare.

The system is fully open about its limits — the methodology page covers exactly how every number is computed, where the dataset comes from, and how confident each figure is.

What's actually under the hood

Every page is statically pre-rendered against a versioned dataset, so the numbers you see on a Tuesday match the numbers another reader sees on a Friday — no per-request volatility, no rate-limited APIs you have to trust. The cost basket combines housing, food, transport, utilities, healthcare, and leisure with lifestyle-tier multipliers. Tax is applied as the combined effective income-tax plus employee-side social security rate for the destination country.

Every city in the catalog is now editorially curated. The four cities that were AI-estimated longest (Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur) were upgraded on 2026-07-03 with sourced connectivity (Ookla Speedtest Global Index) and real income anchors (OECD average wage / World Bank GNI), and their cost indices reviewed against those anchors — so no city now carries an AI-estimated banner. Figures for high-inflation economies like Buenos Aires stay indicative (the peso moves fast) and are flagged as such in the methodology, not as an AI limitation but as an economic fact. Editorial commentary on each page is derived from the structured page data and cached deterministically — the same city + lifestyle combination produces the same prose across rebuilds.

How Mundevo makes money

When you click an affiliate link to a partner we recommend (FX providers like Wise and Revolut, expat health insurance via SafetyWing, eSIMs via Holafly, international moving via MoveHub), Mundevo may receive a referral commission if you sign up. These commissions don't affect what we say about each partner — the partner rotation is driven by a bandit algorithm that optimizes for the intent of the page you're on, not by which partner pays the most.

Display ads via Google AdSense provide additional revenue on most pages. Ads are clearly delineated and never appear inside editorial commentary.