Cost of Living Comparison Actor: one row per city with baskets, indices and an official floor

This cost of living comparison actor returns one row per city with the cost of living baskets for one person and for a family of four (total with rent, without rent, rent and utilities, food, transport, salary after tax), twelve basket lines from lunch to a one-bedroom flat, six cost-of-living indices with the household estimates excluding rent, the versus-city percentages, the nomad score block where that door still answers, and the official country-grain price floor next to all of it. Give it a list of city names and get one structured row each, with every figure labelled city or country grain.

What you get

• One dataset row per city, so a 40-city market sizing is billable only for the rows you actually received.
• Cost baskets for one person and for a family of four: total_with_rent, without_rent, rent_utilities, food, transport and salary_after_tax, plus the world rank and the rank inside the country.
• Twelve basket lines covering the things a relocation quote has to price: lunch menu, dinner for two, a fast-food meal, beer, cappuccino, a soft drink, one-bedroom flat in the centre, a cheaper one-bedroom flat, a three-bedroom flat, utilities for one person and for a family, and an internet plan.
• Six cost-of-living indices: cost of living, rent, cost of living plus rent, groceries, restaurant prices and local purchasing power.
• Household estimates excluding rent for a family of four and for a single person, and the versus-reference-city percentages for cost of living and for rent, so "how much cheaper is Lisbon than Amsterdam" is a field rather than a separate request.
• The nomad score block: nomad score and rank, the monthly cost for a nomad, an expat, a family and a local, the lifestyle band with its monthly figure, average internet speed, the quality of life, family and community bands, and the safety ratings.
• The official country-grain price floor: the harmonised consumer price index (annual average, 2015 = 100), the purchasing-power parity conversion factor in local currency units per international dollar, and for the Netherlands the national consumer price index with its annual change.
• A field_grain map on every row saying which blocks are city grain and which are country grain, and a data_coverage count block saying which blocks returned figures.
• Money in the currency you ask for, with the conversion rate and its date recorded on the row so any number can be traced back to what the source page showed.

Why do a cost of living comparison

Nomad and relocation platforms, HR compensation teams and private equity market sizing all have the same question: what does life in this city cost, and does the salary on the table survive it. The crowd-sourced price tables answer the first half well and the official statistics answer the second half differently, and until now a buyer had to pick one or the other and hope the grain matched.

That gap matters because the numbers disagree in ways that change a decision. A crowd-sourced basket for one city is a real monthly figure. A national consumer price index is a percentage change against a base year. A purchasing-power parity factor is local currency units per international dollar. Placing them in the same row without labels is how a relocation model ends up comparing a Lisbon flat to a Portuguese inflation rate.

The salary arbitrage angle is the reason the Dutch market cares. A Bay Area package tested against Lisbon costs, or a Dutch offer tested against a cheaper market, is one subtraction once salary_after_tax and the basket sit in the same currency in the same row. Doing that by hand means opening three different sites, reconciling three page shapes, guessing at the grain of an index, and re-doing it every time the numbers move.

Input

Field	Required	What it does
cities	Yes	Cities to price. Write Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal to pin the country, or paste a full city page address. Up to 50 per run.
currency	No	Display currency for every money figure. Default USD.
include_baskets	No	Cost baskets and basket lines. On by default.
include_indices	No	Indices, household estimates and versus-city percentages. On by default.
include_scores	No	Nomad score block. On by default.
include_floor	No	Official country floor. On by default.
max_cities	No	Upper bound on cities returned per run, 1 to 50. Default 20.

Output

{
  "city": "Lisbon",
  "country": "Portugal",
  "currency": "EUR",
  "as_of": "2026-09-25",
  "baskets": {
    "grain": "city",
    "one_person": {
      "total_with_rent": 1729.57,
      "without_rent": 621.98,
      "rent_utilities": 1107.59,
      "food": 392.36,
      "transport": 93.25,
      "salary_after_tax": 1411.98,
      "world_rank": 2123,
      "country_rank": 1
    },
    "family_of_four": { "total_with_rent": 3940.36 },
    "basket_lines": {
      "lunch_menu": 12.93,
      "apartment_1bd_centre": 1236.72,
      "utilities_one": 103.81,
      "internet": 29.91
    }
  },
  "indices": {
    "grain": "city",
    "cost_of_living_index": 55.4,
    "rent_index": 34.8,
    "restaurant_price_index": 56.6,
    "local_purchasing_power_index": 69.5,
    "family_of_four_excl_rent": 2745.5,
    "single_person_excl_rent": 760.9,
    "pct_cheaper_than": {
      "vs_city": "Amsterdam",
      "cost_of_living_pct": 30.7,
      "rent_pct": 34.1
    }
  },
  "scores": {
    "grain": "city",
    "nomad_score": 3.79,
    "nomad_rank": 69,
    "cost_of_living_nomad": 4338.88,
    "lifestyle_band": "Medium",
    "internet_mbps": 100,
    "safety": "Good",
    "status": "ok"
  },
  "floor": {
    "grain": "country",
    "country": "Portugal",
    "hicp_annual_average_index": 122.15,
    "ppp_conversion_factor": 0.515993,
    "reference_year": "2024"
  },
  "field_grain": {
    "baskets": "city",
    "indices": "city",
    "scores": "city",
    "floor": "country"
  },
  "data_coverage": { "baskets": 1, "indices": 1, "scores": 1, "floor": 1 },
  "missing_blocks": [],
  "conversion": {
    "USD": { "to": "EUR", "rate": 0.87974, "rate_date": "2026-09-24" }
  }
}

Figures shown are from a September 2026 run and move as the sources update.

Use cases

Relocation platform pricing a move. A user in Amsterdam asks what Lisbon costs. One call returns both cities in one currency: the basket for one person, the basket for a family of four, the rent and utilities line, and the versus-city percentage that the platform can put straight into its copy. The floor block lets the platform show a national price index next to the city basket without mixing the two.

HR compensation team testing a package. A Bay Area offer is on the table and the candidate is looking at Lisbon. salary_after_tax in the row is the local benchmark; the basket is what the package has to cover. The purchasing-power parity factor converts a local figure into an international dollar for a multi-country band, which is what a global comp spreadsheet actually needs.

Private equity market sizing. Forty cities in one run, one row each, with the food and transport basket as the cheapest way to size a consumer market and the local purchasing power index as the correction. max_cities bounds the run and the per-row charge means a pilot of five cities costs a pilot's money.

Salary arbitrage research. The Dutch angle is net salary minus the basket, computed per city pair. salary_after_tax and total_with_rent are the two fields that matter, and putting them in the same currency in the same row is what makes the subtraction possible without a second tool.

How it compares

	This actor	logiover/numbeo-cost-of-living-scrape	automation-lab/numbeo-scraper	lulzasaur/nomadlist-scraper
Sources in one row	Baskets, indices, nomad scores, official floor	One price table	One price table	One score page
Per 1k rows	$4.00	Free (compute only)	Free (compute only)	Free (compute only)
Official statistics floor	Yes, with grain labels	No	No	No
Grain labels per block	Yes	No	No	No
Versus-city percentages	Yes	No	No	No
Household estimates excluding rent	Yes	No	No	No
Nomad score block	Yes	No	No	Yes
Currency conversion recorded	Yes	No	No	No

The closest competitor by audience is logiover/numbeo-cost-of-living-scrape at 53 users, and like the rest of the category it is free: what a buyer pays is compute. What those actors return is one source's page as JSON. This actor folds four blocks into one schema, labels the grain of each, and puts the official country floor next to the crowd numbers so a model can tell a city basket from a national index. What they have that we do not: a free run for a one-source lookup, and nothing to configure.

Pricing

All pricing is pay-per-event at $0.004 per city, one event per returned city row. $4.00 per 1,000 rows. Rows that carry no figures at all are delivered but never charged. All pricing is pay-per-event, you only pay for results you receive. No actor-start fee, no per-compute-unit charges.

Limits and gotchas

• The scoring door answers a limited number of cities per run and then stops. The actor paces itself and stops as soon as that happens, and every remaining city comes back with scores.status set to blocked rather than a zero score. include_scores=false skips that block entirely and makes a long city list cheaper.
• The price tables and the index pages also answer a limited number of requests before they refuse. The actor pauses between cities. max_cities is the real lever on a big list: raise it only when the run is worth the extra minutes.
• Money figures arrive in whatever unit each source publishes in. The actor reads the unit off the page, converts to your currency, and records the rate and its date under conversion. If no rate can be published for a unit, those figures stay in their original unit and the row says so.
• The official floor is country grain. field_grain marks it as such. Do not read a national consumer price index as a city number; it is there as a floor, not as a basket.
• The purchasing-power parity factor is local currency units per international dollar. It is not a price level and not a cost.
• City resolution uses the source's own city index, so a bare Lisbon resolves to the right country. An ambiguous name with no country resolves to the largest match and the row reports the country it found.
• A run of 20 cities takes a few minutes because of the pacing. That is the cost of staying inside the sources' budgets.

FAQ

How do I run a cost of living comparison of cities? Put both cities in cities (Lisbon, Amsterdam) and read the two rows. pct_cheaper_than on each row gives the versus-city percentage the index source publishes, and both rows are converted to the same currency so the baskets subtract cleanly.

What does a cost of living comparison between cities actually return? One row per city with four blocks: the cost baskets, the indices and household estimates, the nomad score block, and the official country floor. Each block carries a grain label and the row carries a coverage count, so you can see which blocks returned figures.

Can I get cost of living for Lisbon, Portugal specifically? Yes. Write Lisbon, Portugal to pin the country, or Lisbon alone and let the city index resolve it. The row comes back with country filled in either way.

How do I compare minimum wage against cost of living? The row carries salary_after_tax alongside the baskets, which is the monthly net figure the comparison needs. Bring your own minimum wage figure for the market you are testing and subtract total_with_rent for the standard of living you have in mind.

Does the nomad score block always come back? No. That door answers a limited number of cities per run. When it closes, the remaining rows carry scores.status set to blocked. Turn include_scores off if you only want baskets and indices.

Which figures are city grain and which are country grain? field_grain says so on every row. Baskets, indices and scores are city grain. The floor block is country grain and carries the country name with it.

Related Actors

• Google Flights Scraper for the travel cost side of a move alongside the monthly basket.
• Zillow Scraper for US rental listings next to the rent and utilities line.
• LinkedIn Jobs Scraper for the salary side of the arbitrage question.