Seven sites that do Numbeo's job, and the one question none of them answers
By Skyler Bissell · September 1, 2026 · 9 min read
Numbeo prices the world against New York City at 100, and most people searching for sites like it want one of two things. Either a second opinion on the prices, because a crowdsourced line item looked off, or a different job entirely, because "how expensive is Lisbon" turned into "can I afford to move there" somewhere between two tabs. Those are different requests, and the seven sites below split cleanly along them.
So this page is sorted by job. For each site: what it is, the job it does best, and where it stops, drawn from each site's own pages. Six of them will serve you well at the shortlisting stage. The seventh is for the week a salary enters the picture.
Sites like Numbeo fall into four groups: crowdsourced price indexes (Expatistan, plus Wise's cost of living pages), professionally surveyed rankings built for employers (Mercer, the EIU), US-domestic instruments (NerdWallet's C2ER-based calculator, the BEA's Regional Price Parities), and salary tools (levels.fyi for the gross offer, cityparity for the after-tax equivalent). Which one you want depends on the job in front of you.
TL;DR
- The closest like-for-like is Expatistan: same crowdsourced model, different base city. The second crowd.
- For US-domestic moves and official data, the C2ER-based calculators and the BEA's price parities do the job Numbeo was never built for. The US pair.
- Every index on this list stops at prices. The after-tax salary question needs a different instrument. Where that lives.
The seven at a glance
| Site | What it is | Use it when | What it never shows |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expatistan | Crowdsourced price index, Prague = 100 | You want a second crowd on the same two cities | Taxes, salaries, benefits |
| Wise cost of living index | City and country guides on live user data | You are budgeting a shortlist by category | Income tax computed on your salary |
| Mercer / EIU rankings | Institutional surveys, New York base | Expat packages, mobility policy, headlines | Anything about your own household |
| NerdWallet (C2ER COLI) | US-domestic index calculator, 60 items | Your move stays inside the US | Tax data, by its own methodology |
| BEA Regional Price Parities | Official US price levels, national = 100 | You need the official, citable figure | Anywhere outside the US |
| levels.fyi | Crowdsourced and verified salary data | You are benchmarking the offer itself | What the offer keeps across a border |
| cityparity | Salary equivalence engine, taxes and benefits in | A real cross-border move with a salary attached | A price database to browse |
Each description per the site's own pages, retrieved 1 September 2026.
Expatistan: the second crowd
Expatistan is the closest thing to Numbeo that is not Numbeo: visitors submit prices for their own city, a statistical model aggregates and cleans them, and every city gets an index number. The base is the interesting design choice. Where Numbeo measures everything against New York City, Expatistan sets Prague at 100, chosen by its own account because Prague is neither among the most expensive cities nor the cheapest and has a large expat community. A city at 134 is 34% pricier than Prague, and the site flags cities whose data is too thin to trust, excluding them from its general ranking.
Use it when you want a second, independent crowd pricing the same pair of cities. Two crowdsourced indexes agreeing is weak confirmation; two disagreeing is a real signal that one basket has a thin or skewed sample. The limitation is the one it shares with Numbeo: self-reported prices, and nothing beyond prices. We put the two side by side, line by line, in Numbeo vs Expatistan.
Wise: category budgets for a shortlist
Wise's cost of living index covers over 100 cities plus country pages, built, in its own words, "by taking live user data" into a standardised basket of common goods and services. The output is organized into nine spending categories, from housing and utilities through healthcare, education and childcare, which makes it more of a budgeting guide than a rankings engine.
Use it when you are turning a shortlist into monthly budgets by category, especially if you already move money with Wise and want the currency side in the same place. Two caveats: the pages name no external data provider beyond "live user data," and while a taxes category appears among the spending lines, the pages do not claim to compute income tax on your salary, so treat that category as one more living cost.
Mercer and the EIU: the headline machines
When a news story says a city has become the world's most expensive, the source is usually one of two institutional surveys. Mercer's Cost of Living City Ranking covers 226 cities in its 2024 edition, pricing over 200 items in each location, from housing and transportation to food and household goods, with New York City as the base and movements measured against the US dollar. The EIU's Worldwide Cost of Living survey is the other, also benchmarked against New York, sold to businesses rather than movers. Both exist, as Mercer puts it, so multinational employers can design compensation packages for international assignees.
Use it when you are on the receiving end of an expat package and want to know what instrument HR is holding, or you want professionally surveyed price levels instead of a crowd's. The limits follow from the customer: most of the detail is paywalled, the baskets are tuned to expatriate consumption rather than yours, and a ranking of 226 cities has no cell for your household, your kids or your tax bill.
The US-domestic pair: C2ER calculators and the BEA
Numbeo's worldwide coverage is overkill for a Denver-to-Austin question, and two US-only sources do that job with more rigor. The consumer-facing one is NerdWallet's calculator, built on the C2ER Cost of Living Index: 60 goods and services in six categories, surveyed professionally since 1968, weighted to professional and executive households, and described by C2ER as the only local-level cost of living index available for the US. NerdWallet's methodology is unusually plainspoken about both ends of its pipeline: the data comes from over 300 independent researchers pricing items locally, and the calculator doesn't include tax data.
The official one is the BEA's Regional Price Parities, government statistics that set the national price level at 100 and place all 50 states, the District of Columbia and every metro against it. For 2024, the latest year, California reads 110.7 and Mississippi 87.0, with Arkansas at 86.9 the lowest in the table.
Use them when your move stays inside the US: the C2ER-based calculators for a quick two-metro comparison, the BEA when you want the free, citable, official figure underneath an argument. Inside one country the index shortcut mostly holds, because the big non-price items sit on both sides of the move; why US calculators break for international moves covers where that stops being true.
levels.fyi: the other side of the equation
Every site so far prices the destination. levels.fyi prices you: crowdsourced salary submissions plus a verified-salaries set, organized by company, level, title and location, with negotiation services on top. For tech workers it has become the reference for what an offer should look like, and pairing it with any of the price indexes above is how most people first assemble a move budget.
Use it when you are benchmarking the offer itself. The limit is the units: its numbers are gross, so a Zurich figure and an Austin figure sit side by side before either tax code, either healthcare system, or either childcare bill has spoken, and across a border those routinely reorder the ranking. We walked through that gap in cityparity vs Levels.fyi.
cityparity: when the shortlist becomes a decision
This is our own tool, so here is its scope stated plainly. cityparity is a salary equivalence engine over two cities: it runs both tax codes on your household, prices childcare after subsidy, healthcare as you would pay it, and the statutory vacation and parental leave floor, then solves for the salary in city B that leaves your net position unchanged. It is built from official sources for the tax and benefit lines, uses crowdsourced prices only for groceries and discretionary spending, clearly marked, and covers 178 cities. It is a decision instrument for one pair at a time; if you want to browse the price of a cappuccino in more cities than we will ever cover, the crowdsourced indexes above do that and cityparity never will.
The reason it belongs on a list of Numbeo alternatives is the question it answers. Every other entry here outputs a price level, a ranking, or a gross salary. None outputs the number a mover needs: what do I have to earn there? For one pair, on our published base scenario, a single professional on $150,000 in New York matches their net position in Madrid at €88,894. No index on this page can produce that figure, because producing it requires Spain's tax code, New York's, and a definition of the household, none of which live in a price basket. You can see that pair line by line on the New York vs Madrid comparison, and the layer the indexes skip sits in take-home pay by country.
Use it when a shortlist has collapsed to one or two cities and a salary is on the table. For the full argument about where price indexes stop, the pillar is what every cost-of-living calculator gets wrong, and the direct head-to-head is cityparity vs Numbeo.
Two you will still see recommended
Teleport. The city-matching tool at teleport.org shows up in older "sites like Numbeo" lists, and it is gone: the domain did not respond when we checked on 1 September 2026, and third-party directories list it as discontinued. Strike it from any list you are working from.
PPP converters. Tools built on purchasing power parity factors convert a salary between countries at one ratio per country pair. They are honest about being macro instruments: no city dimension, no household, one number for all of Germany. A purchasing power parity example shows what the ratio captures and where it stops.
FAQ
What is the closest site to Numbeo?
Expatistan. It runs the same model: users submit prices, a statistical layer cleans them, and every city gets an index number. The main difference is the base: Numbeo measures against New York City at 100, Expatistan against Prague at 100, so their numbers describe the same cities on different scales. Numbeo vs Expatistan compares the two row by row.
Do any Numbeo alternatives include income taxes?
The price indexes do not. Numbeo's own definitions cover consumer goods, services and rent, with no income-tax line, and NerdWallet's methodology states outright that its calculator doesn't include tax data. Tax on a salary is a computation on your income, your household and two legal codes, which is a different instrument from a price survey. cityparity runs that computation; so does a good accountant.
Is Teleport still available?
No. Teleport.org did not respond when we checked on 1 September 2026, and third-party directories list the city-comparison tool as discontinued. If Teleport was your shortlisting tool, the closest working substitutes are Expatistan for prices and cityparity for the salary and benefits side of the same question.
Which Numbeo alternative works for a move inside the US?
Two cover it well. NerdWallet's calculator, built on C2ER's Cost of Living Index, compares metro price levels and is the standard consumer tool. The BEA's Regional Price Parities are the official government statistic for the same question, free and citable, with the national price level set to 100. Note that neither includes income tax: NerdWallet says so in its methodology, and the BEA measures prices only.
Keep two tabs, in the end. One price index you trust enough to argue with, for the shortlisting months, and one instrument that can hold a salary, both tax codes and your household in the same frame, for the week the offer lands. When that week comes, run the after-tax math on your own two cities.
Sources. Site descriptions, each from the site's own pages, retrieved 1 September 2026: Numbeo, About the Cost of Living Indexes; Expatistan, How does it work; Wise, Cost of Living Index; Mercer, Cost of Living City Ranking (2024 edition); C2ER, What is COLI; NerdWallet, Cost of Living Calculator; US Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Price Parities, 2024 values; levels.fyi. The equivalent salary is computed by cityparity's engine; per-field provenance is in data/_meta.json, and our own price lines split between official and crowdsourced sources as described in the methodology.
Equivalent salaries solve for equal net cash after tax, housing, childcare, healthcare and the cash value of statutory benefits, and they are the salary an offer has to clear rather than a salary any employer is obliged to pay. Numbeo, Expatistan, Wise, Mercer, the EIU, NerdWallet and levels.fyi are independent tools, referenced for comparison only. See the methodology.