Numbeo Cost of Living Scraper

Extract real-world cost of living data, rental prices, city rankings and quality of life indices from Numbeo.com — the world's largest crowdsourced database of city prices, with 9.7 million+ prices across 12,600+ cities in 197 countries.

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🌍 What Is Numbeo?

Numbeo is the go-to reference for comparing cost of living between cities and countries. It's used by expats, remote workers, HR teams, researchers, journalists, and real estate investors to understand how far a salary stretches in different parts of the world.

This actor extracts all of that data programmatically — with no API key required.

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📦 What Data Can You Get?

🏙️ City Price Data (55+ items per city)

Every city page is scraped into individual flat rows — one row per price item — making the data immediately usable in spreadsheets, databases, and BI tools.

Category	Items
🍽️ Restaurants	Inexpensive meal, mid-range dinner for two, fast food combo, domestic/imported beer, cappuccino, soft drink, water
🛒 Markets	Milk, bread, rice, eggs, cheese, chicken, beef, apples, bananas, oranges, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, lettuce, wine, bottled water, cigarettes
🚌 Transportation	One-way ticket, monthly pass, taxi start/km/hour, gasoline, Volkswagen Golf price, Toyota Corolla price
💡 Utilities	Basic utilities (85m² apt), mobile plan, broadband internet
🏋️ Sports & Leisure	Gym membership, tennis court, cinema ticket
👶 Childcare	Preschool monthly fee, international primary school annual tuition
👗 Clothing & Shoes	Jeans (Levi's), summer dress, Nike shoes, leather business shoes
🏠 Rent Per Month	1BR/3BR apartment — city centre and outside centre
🏢 Buy Apartment	Price per m² — city centre and outside centre
💰 Salaries	Average monthly net salary (after tax), mortgage interest rate

Each price row includes:

• avgPrice — the average reported price
• lowestPrice — bottom of the reported range
• highestPrice — top of the reported range
• categoryGroup — which category the item belongs to
• currency — the local currency the price is displayed in

📊 Global City Rankings

Scrape the full ranked list of cities with their composite indices:

Index	Description
Cost of Living Index	Relative cost compared to New York City (baseline = 100)
Rent Index	Relative rental costs
Cost of Living + Rent Index	Combined measure
Groceries Index	Supermarket price levels
Restaurant Price Index	Eating out costs
Local Purchasing Power Index	How much residents can buy with local wages

🌐 Country-Level Averages

Instead of individual cities, get nationwide average prices — useful for high-level country comparisons.

🔬 Additional Categories

Beyond cost of living, you can also scrape:

• Quality of Life (safety, healthcare, climate, traffic, pollution scores)
• Crime Index (safety perception, crime rates)
• Health Care Index (healthcare quality scores)
• Pollution Index (air quality, water quality)
• Traffic Index (commute times, traffic stress)

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⚙️ Input Configuration

{
  "cities": [
    "Istanbul",
    "London",
    "New-York,-NY",
    "Berlin",
    "Tokyo",
    "Dubai",
    "Barcelona",
    "Singapore"
  ],
  "countries": ["Turkey", "Germany", "Japan"],
  "scrapeRankings": true,
  "scrapeCategories": ["cost-of-living", "quality-of-life", "crime"],
  "maxCities": 500,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]
  }
}

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
cities	string[]	[]	List of cities to scrape. Use Numbeo's URL format: spaces → hyphens, e.g. "New-York,-NY", "Sao-Paulo", "Buenos-Aires"
countries	string[]	[]	Country names for country-level averages, e.g. "Germany", "Japan"
scrapeRankings	boolean	true	Scrape the global city rankings table for all selected categories
scrapeCategories	string[]	["cost-of-living"]	Which Numbeo sections to scrape. Options: cost-of-living, quality-of-life, crime, health-care, pollution, traffic, property-investment
maxCities	integer	500	Max cities in rankings output. Set 0 for all cities
proxyConfiguration	object	—	Proxy settings. Residential proxy is strongly recommended

🗺️ City Name Format

Numbeo uses a specific URL format for city names. Replace spaces with hyphens:

City	Input Value
New York, NY	New-York,-NY
Los Angeles	Los-Angeles
São Paulo	Sao-Paulo
Buenos Aires	Buenos-Aires
Hong Kong	Hong-Kong
Mexico City	Mexico-City
Istanbul	Istanbul
London	London

💡 Tip: If you're unsure about a city's exact name, go to numbeo.com/cost-of-living and look at the URL after selecting a city.

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📤 Output Format

Each price item is stored as a flat, individual row — no nested arrays. This makes the data directly importable into Excel, Google Sheets, BigQuery, or any database.

City Price Row

{
  "type": "city_price",
  "city": "Cost of Living in London",
  "category": "cost-of-living",
  "currency": "GBP",
  "itemName": "1 Bedroom Apartment in City Centre",
  "avgPrice": 2367.24,
  "lowestPrice": 1700,
  "highestPrice": 3150,
  "categoryGroup": "Rent Per Month",
  "url": "https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/London",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-03-14T14:21:51.404Z"
}

Global Ranking Row

{
  "type": "ranking",
  "category": "cost-of-living",
  "rank": 1,
  "city": "Zurich, Switzerland",
  "Cost of Living Index": 121.5,
  "Rent Index": 69,
  "Cost of Living Plus Rent Index": 97.1,
  "Groceries Index": 122.8,
  "Restaurant Price Index": 125.5,
  "Local Purchasing Power Index": 170.1,
  "url": "https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_current.jsp",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-03-14T14:10:54.483Z"
}

Country Price Row

{
  "type": "country_price",
  "country": "Cost of Living in Germany",
  "category": "cost-of-living",
  "currency": "EUR",
  "itemName": "Average Monthly Net Salary (After Tax)",
  "avgPrice": 2891.42,
  "lowestPrice": null,
  "highestPrice": null,
  "categoryGroup": "Salaries And Financing",
  "url": "https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result_for?country=Germany",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-03-14T14:10:54.483Z"
}

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💡 Use Cases

🧳 Relocation & Expat Planning

Compare the real cost of living across potential relocation destinations. Rent, groceries, transport, utilities — everything side by side. Used by thousands of expats, digital nomads and international job seekers.

💼 HR & Salary Benchmarking

Adjust compensation packages for remote workers or international hires based on accurate local purchasing power. If your employee earns $5,000/month in New York but is moving to Lisbon, what's the equivalent fair salary?

🏗️ Real Estate & Investment Research

Track apartment prices per m² across global markets. Compare rental yields by city. Monitor how prices shift over time by scheduling regular scrapes.

📊 Market Research & Business Intelligence

Understand where your product or service is affordable versus where it's out of reach. Calibrate pricing strategies for different regional markets.

🎓 Academic & Economic Research

Cost of living data is a foundational input for purchasing power parity (PPP) calculations, inequality research, and economic comparison studies. Numbeo's crowdsourced data covers cities that official statistics often miss.

🤖 AI & Machine Learning Training Data

Build regression models, price prediction tools, or cost-of-living calculators. The structured, categorized price data with min/max ranges is ideal for training supervised learning models.

✈️ Travel Budget Planning

How much does a cappuccino cost in Tokyo vs Vienna? What's a realistic daily budget for backpacking Southeast Asia? Real crowd-sourced prices, not tourist estimates.

📰 Journalism & Data Visualization

Power cost-of-living comparison articles, interactive maps, and "most/least affordable city" rankings with fresh, up-to-date data.

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📈 Expected Volume

Input	Expected Items
1 city, cost-of-living only	~55 items
10 cities, cost-of-living only	~550 items
100 cities, cost-of-living only	~5,500 items
Global rankings (all cities)	~600–700 items
1 city, all 7 categories	~200–300 items
Full global dataset (rankings + top 100 cities)	~6,000–7,000 items

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🔧 Technical Notes

• Crawler type: CheerioCrawler — lightweight static HTML parsing, no JavaScript rendering needed
• No API key required — data is scraped from public Numbeo web pages
• Residential proxy recommended — Numbeo rate-limits datacenter IPs; residential proxy improves reliability significantly
• Data freshness — Numbeo prices are updated continuously by community contributors. Running this actor gives you a snapshot of current prices
• Currency — prices are displayed in the local currency by default (GBP for London, TRY for Istanbul, etc.)
• Rate limiting — the actor is polite: 3 concurrent requests max with random delays between requests

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⚠️ Important Notes

• Proxy is required for scraping more than a handful of cities. Without it, Numbeo may return rate-limit errors (590 upstream errors). Use "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"] in your proxy configuration.
• City name format matters. Use hyphens instead of spaces: New-York,-NY not New York, NY. If a city isn't found, check the exact URL on Numbeo.com.
• Numbeo's data is crowdsourced — prices reflect community-reported values and may vary from official statistics. Range (low/high) gives you the spread of reported values.

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🆚 Why This Actor vs. Numbeo's Official API?

	This Actor	Numbeo Official API
Cost	Pay per result	Paid subscription (~$500+/year)
Auth required	No	Yes (API key)
Categories	All 7 categories	All categories
Historical data	❌ (current only)	✅ (premium tier)
Setup time	Seconds	Days (application required)
Rate limits	Proxy-dependent	Hard API limits

For one-off research, competitive datasets, or budget-conscious projects, this actor is the practical choice.

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📬 Support

If you encounter issues, have feature requests, or need a custom data extraction — leave a review or contact the actor developer through the Apify platform.