Numbeo Cost of Living & Quality of Life Scraper | No API key

For relocation researchers, salary calculators, and AI agents comparing city cost-of-living and livability — without a Numbeo API subscription.

No API key required. No login. $1.00/1,000 price items · $3.00/1,000 city index records (Pay Per Event). Every record includes parse_confidence (0.0–1.0) and warnings.

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What data you get

Cost-of-living mode — 55 itemized prices per city

One record per item, grouped into 10 categories: Restaurants, Markets, Transportation, Utilities (Monthly), Sports and Leisure, Childcare, Clothing and Shoes, Rent Per Month, Buy Apartment Price, Salaries and Financing.

• city, city_slug, category, item (e.g. "Meal at an Inexpensive Restaurant")
• price, currency (parsed from the displayed value, e.g. $25.00 → price=25.0, currency="$")
• price_low, price_high — the observed contributor range shown on Numbeo's price bar

Quality-of-life mode — composite indices per city

One record per city with 8 sub-indices (each a numeric score + qualitative rating: Very High/High/Moderate/Low/Very Low) and the overall composite:

• purchasing_power_index / purchasing_power_rating
• safety_index / safety_rating
• health_care_index / health_care_rating
• climate_index / climate_rating
• cost_of_living_index / cost_of_living_rating
• property_price_to_income_ratio / property_price_to_income_rating
• traffic_commute_time_index / traffic_commute_time_rating
• pollution_index / pollution_rating
• qol_index — the overall composite Quality of Life Index

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Access path & compliance

Both endpoints are server-rendered HTML, no Cloudflare/JS challenge — fetched with curl_cffi browser-TLS impersonation, no browser or residential proxy required (verified live 2026-07-15).

• numbeo.com/robots.txt disallows only /heavy_crawling.any — both /cost-of-living/in/<city> and /quality-of-life/in/<city> are fully clean, no restrictions.
• No login wall, no rate-limit encountered during recon probing.

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Input

Field	Mode	Description
mode	both	cost-of-living or quality-of-life
cities	both	City names, e.g. ["New York", "London", "Tokyo"] — auto-slugified (spaces → hyphens)
maxItems	cost-of-living	Max total price-item records across all cities (0 = no limit)

City names are auto-converted to Numbeo's URL slug format ("New York" → "New-York"). Ambiguous city names (multiple cities share a name, e.g. several "Cambridge"s) may resolve to the wrong page or a 404 — pass the exact Numbeo slug (visible in the site's own URL) for those cases.

Output examples

Cost-of-living (abridged):

{
  "city": "New York", "city_slug": "New-York",
  "category": "Restaurants", "item": "Meal at an Inexpensive Restaurant",
  "price": 25.0, "currency": "$", "price_low": 15.0, "price_high": 50.0,
  "mode": "cost-of-living", "scraped_at": "2026-07-15T10:00:00Z",
  "parse_confidence": 1.0, "warnings": []
}

Quality-of-life (abridged):

{
  "city": "New York", "city_slug": "New-York",
  "qol_index": 136.89,
  "purchasing_power_index": 105.49, "purchasing_power_rating": "High",
  "safety_index": 49.20, "safety_rating": "Moderate",
  "cost_of_living_index": 100.00, "cost_of_living_rating": "Very High",
  "mode": "quality-of-life", "scraped_at": "2026-07-15T10:00:00Z",
  "parse_confidence": 1.0, "warnings": []
}

Edge cases

• Unresolvable / misspelled city: cost-of-living mode pushes one record with warnings: ["fetch_failed"], all price fields null; quality-of-life mode does the same for its one record.
• City page exists but table format changed: warnings: ["no_items_parsed"] (cost-of-living) or ["no_indices_parsed"] (quality-of-life), parse_confidence near 0 — a loud signal to re-check the site structure, not a silent empty result.
• Partial index set (rare small cities missing e.g. a Climate Index): warnings: ["some_indices_missing"], the missing sub-index fields are null, others still populate.

Known limitations

• No historical trend data (Numbeo's /cost-of-living/prices_by_city.jsp history view isn't covered by this actor's two modes).
• Currency is whatever Numbeo displays server-side for that city (mostly USD by default) — no currency-conversion parameter in this version.

Usage statistics

This Actor creates a small, content-free summary at the end of each run. It is used only to monitor reliability and improve this Actor. A copy is saved as USAGE_STATS in your own Apify key-value store, so you can see the exact record created for your run.

Set disableUsageStats to true in the input to opt out. Nothing is sent then; your USAGE_STATS record only says that statistics were disabled.

Only these fields are recorded:

• schema version, Actor name and build number;
• UTC start and finish hour (not a precise timestamp);
• run duration, number of results and time to the first result, each as a coarse range;
• whether the result was empty, the end status, and an error type from a fixed list;
• memory setting and counts of charged events;
• names of the input fields you set, never their values;
• the selected option for input fields that offer a fixed list of choices (for example a sort order).

We do not collect input text, search terms, URLs, domains, usernames, email addresses, names, proxy credentials, tokens, scraped records, output items, raw error messages, stack traces, or hashes of any of those values. Records are kept for no longer than 13 months, used only as aggregated operational statistics, and never sold or shared.

Additional fields (Phase 2)

This Actor also records your Apify user ID, whether Apify marks the account as paying, the size range of list inputs, the selected country when the input offers a fixed list of countries, and one category from a fixed Actor taxonomy. We use these fields only for aggregate reliability, repeat-use and cross-Actor analysis; reports suppress any cell with fewer than five distinct users.

The same disableUsageStats: true input flag turns these fields off too. The user ID is removed after 13 months; we do not export, sell, share, or attempt to re-identify this data.

Run-outcome signals (v2)

To learn whether a run did what it was asked to do, the record also holds a few more coarse ranges and yes/no flags. None of them contains content:

• the result limit you asked for (a range, when the input has one) and what share of it was delivered;
• results delivered per input item you listed (a range);
• output quality as ranges: how fully the result fields were filled, the share of rows that look like errors, the share of duplicate rows, and how many different fields appeared. These are counted in memory while results are saved; no result content is kept;
• how the run was started (console, API, schedule, webhook, another Actor);
• how it ended: stopped by you, timed out, reached the requested limit, stopped by the charge limit, and how many times the platform moved the run;
• if this Actor reports it: how many items to process worked or failed (ranges) and one failure reason from a fixed list;
• a short code made from the names of the input fields you set, never their values.

Repeat-run fingerprint (v2)

When your Apify user ID is recorded (see above), the record also holds an 8-character one-way code made from your input (proxy settings left out) and this Actor's name. It only lets us see that the same account ran the same input again soon after an unsatisfying run; we never see the input itself. It is stored only in the database, never published, and reports use it in aggregate with the same five-user minimum. It is the one exception to the statement above that no hashes are collected, and disableUsageStats: true turns it off.