How the numbers are computed

Cost-of-living index

The cost-of-living index is a composite of six monthly cost categories — housing, food, transport, utilities, leisure, and healthcare — normalized so that New York City equals 100. A city with a cost index of 60 has a consumer basket roughly 40% cheaper than NYC; a city at 130 is 30% more expensive.

The rent index is computed separately and uses the same NYC = 100 anchor. It tracks the median asking rent for a one-bedroom apartment in a central neighborhood. Rent and cost indices typically correlate but diverge in cities where housing is unusually expensive or cheap relative to consumer goods (e.g. Zurich, where rent runs lower than the overall cost level would suggest).

Lifestyle multipliers

Each city's basket is scaled by lifestyle tier:

• Frugal — essentials × 0.85, leisure × 0.40, anchored to the 25th-percentile rent. Shared housing, cooking at home, public transit.
• Balanced — essentials × 1.00, leisure × 1.00, anchored to median rent. Solo apartment, occasional dining out, modest savings.
• Comfortable — essentials × 1.15, leisure × 1.60, anchored to the 70th-percentile rent. Larger apartment, regular dining, gym, travel.
• Premium — essentials × 1.35, leisure × 2.50, anchored to the 90th-percentile rent. Top-tier housing, private healthcare, frequent travel.

These multipliers are editorial defaults derived from observed spending patterns across the income distribution. They are NOT marginal tax brackets — they represent total category spend at each tier.

Salary calculation (net → gross)

The required monthly net is the sum of essentials and leisure at the chosen lifestyle tier, plus a savings buffer (typically 10% of net by default; the calculator lets you adjust this between 0–30%).

The required monthly gross is then computed by dividing the net target by (1 − combined deduction rate), where the combined rate is the country's effective income-tax rate plus the employee-side social security contribution. Both rates are populated per country in the source dataset.

The effective income-tax rate is the total tax paid divided by gross income for a single salaried filer at the country's median wage — NOT a marginal rate. Country-specific regimes (Portugal NHR, Spain Beckham, UAE residency programs, etc.) are not modelled. Self-employed, contractor, and corporate-structure flows are also out of scope.

Quality indices

Three quality indices — safety, healthcare, air quality — are scored on a 0–100 scale (higher is better). The composite Mundevo score that appears on each city page is a weighted average: 40% safety, 35% healthcare, 25% air. These weights are editorial defaults; readers with strong preferences should re-weight manually.

Internet speed is reported as the median fixed-broadband download in Mbps. For remote-work decisions, treat anything above 100 Mbps as comfortable; below 50 Mbps is unreliable for daily video calls.

FX rates

Every cross-currency conversion uses a static FX table refreshed periodically. Rates are deliberately not pulled live per request so that the same comparison shown to two readers on the same day returns identical numbers — relocation decisions shouldn't whip-saw based on intra-day FX volatility. Live rates can be ±5–10% from the table; cross-check before committing to a contract.

AI-estimated cities

4 cities still carry AI-estimated rather than primary-source data: Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur. Every page involving one of these cities surfaces an explicit "AI-estimated data for X" entry in the methodology block. Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney and Zurich were upgraded on 2026-05-27; Toronto, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Vienna and Seoul on 2026-05-28. The remaining four are kept AI because their underlying data has structural uncertainty — high inflation, dual exchange rates, or large intra-city cost variance — that makes a hand-curated number no more reliable than the model's estimate on a quarterly review cycle.

Treat AI-estimated figures as ±15–25% directional estimates, not measurements. Pressure-test against a local listing site (rent), Numbeo, or Expatistan before acting on individual line items. We plan to upgrade these to primary-source data over time; corrections from readers in those cities are welcomed at mundevocom@gmail.com.

Update cadence

Cost figures are reviewed quarterly. Tax rates are reviewed annually or whenever a country materially changes its payroll regime. The dataAsOf date stamped on each city is the most recent review of that specific city; the catalog- wide lastmod is the most recent review of any city.