Berlin, 55.8. New York, 100. What a cost of living index measures, and what people read into it.
By Skyler Bissell · August 31, 2026 · 8 min read
At the end of August 2026, Numbeo's cost of living plus rent index put Berlin at 55.8, Lisbon at 47.3, Prague at 44.7 and London at 80.1, all against New York City's 100. Four cities, four numbers, one quiet question almost nobody stops on: 55.8 percent of what, exactly? This page takes one of those rows apart, because a cost of living index is a useful instrument whose readers routinely make it answer questions it never asked.
A cost of living index is the price of one fixed basket of goods and services in a place, expressed as a percentage of the same basket's price in a base, and the base is set to 100. Berlin at 55.8 on Numbeo means the basket that costs $100 in New York costs about $55.80 in Berlin. The index compares prices between places at one moment; it does not measure inflation, quality of life, salaries or taxes.
TL;DR
- The same city carries different index numbers on different publishers' scales, because each publisher picks its own base for 100. The three bases.
- Everything that decides your take-home is outside the basket: taxes, subsidies, statutory benefits, your household shape. What the number holds.
- Read as a salary instruction, Lisbon's index misses the engine's answer by tens of thousands of dollars a year. The misreads.
What 100 is: three publishers, three different zeros
An index number is a fraction wearing a disguise, and the denominator is whatever the publisher chose as its base. The three you will meet most often chose differently:
| Index | What 100 is | Coverage and method |
|---|---|---|
| Numbeo | New York City = 100 | Worldwide, crowdsourced prices; Berlin reads 55.8 with rent, against that New York base |
| C2ER Cost of Living Index | Average of all participating US places = 100 | US only, surveyed since 1968; ~60 items in six categories, weighted to professional households |
| BEA Regional Price Parities | US national price level = 100 | US states and metros, official statistics; California reads 110.7 and Mississippi 87.0 for 2024 |
Base definitions from each publisher, retrieved 31 August 2026; sources at the foot of the page. Numbeo values move continuously as contributions arrive.
The consequence is easy to state and easy to forget: index numbers do not travel between publishers. California's 110.7 and Berlin's 55.8 are both real, both current, and not comparable, because one is measured against the US national price level and the other against New York City, one of the most expensive baskets in the country that base averages over. A city can sit above 100 on one scale and below it on another without anything being wrong.
What is inside the number, and what never is
Numbeo's own definitions are precise about the contents: the cost of living index covers consumer goods and services, "including groceries, dining, transportation, and utilities," and explicitly excludes rent and mortgage payments, which live in the separate rent index; the plus-rent variant merges the two. C2ER prices groceries, housing, utilities, transportation, health care and miscellaneous goods. All of it is prices: things with a till receipt.
Now list what has no till receipt. Income tax and social contributions, which take 45.6% of a €129,000 salary in Lisbon and 12.1% of the same converted salary in Sofia. Childcare subsidies, which change the sign of the family math between countries. Healthcare systems, where one country hands you a premium bill and another folds it into payroll. Statutory vacation and parental leave, worth real money and set by law rather than by shops. Your own household, since a single renter and a family of four buy different baskets than the index's fixed one. None of these can appear in any price index, no matter how carefully it is collected, because none of them is a price on a shelf. That is the structural half of what every cost-of-living calculator gets wrong, and it is no fault of the index makers.
How to read a row, and the three standard misreads
The correct reading of "Lisbon 47.3" is one modest sentence: the surveyed basket, rent included, costs about 47% of its New York price. That sentence survives scrutiny. The misreads begin when the number is promoted into something bigger.
Misread one: the index as a salary instruction. The tempting arithmetic says a New Yorker on $150,000 could keep their life on 47.3% of it in Lisbon, about $71,000. Our engine solves the same move by holding the household's net position constant, with Portuguese taxes, Portuguese healthcare and Lisbon rent all in the ledger, and returns €96,792, which is $112,158 at the current rate: more than half again the index arithmetic. The biggest reason is visible in one token above. Portugal takes 45.6% of gross at that level while New York takes 31.1%, and a price index has no cell in which that fact could live. Cheap shops and an expensive payslip are both true of Lisbon at this salary, and only one of them is in the number.
Misread two: the index as a verdict on a city. A low number reads as an endorsement and a high one as a warning, but the index has no opinion; it prices a basket. Whether Prague at 44.7 is a bargain depends entirely on what a Prague salary, taxed in Prague, leaves you to spend in those cheap shops. Local wages tend to be low where local prices are, which is the same trap purchasing power parity sets at the country level.
Misread three: the index as portable. Quoting "Berlin is 55.8" without naming Numbeo and New York strips the number of its base, and a base-less index is just a digit string. The same habit mangles domestic comparisons when a C2ER figure, measured against a US average, is set beside a Numbeo one measured against New York. Name the publisher and the base, every time, or the comparison is between two different questions.
Where an index is the right tool
Used as designed, an index is quick, wide and honest. It answers "are prices high there?" for hundreds of cities at a glance, which no per-household engine will ever do as cheaply, and within its own scale it ranks coherently. The BEA's parities are the careful official answer for US regions; Numbeo's coverage reaches cities no statistical agency surveys at all. Reach for an index to shortlist, to sanity-check a feeling, to compare two cities' price levels inside one publisher's scale.
Then, when a shortlist becomes a decision with a salary attached, switch instruments. The question stops being "what do things cost there?" and becomes "what must I earn there?", and that question needs the till-receipt-less items: both tax codes, both healthcare models, the childcare rules, the statutory floor. That is the move from a price index to an equivalence engine, and why US calculators break for international moves walks the same boundary from the tool side. Run your own pair on the calculator, or see the layer indexes never touch in take-home pay by country.
FAQ
What does a cost of living index of 70 mean?
It means the index's basket costs 70% of what the same basket costs in the index's base, so first find the base. On Numbeo, 70 means 70% of New York City prices. On C2ER's index, 70 means 70% of the average of all participating US urban areas. On the BEA's Regional Price Parities, 70 would mean 70% of the US national price level. The digits are meaningless until the base is named.
Is a cost of living index of 100 good or bad?
Neither. 100 is the base of the comparison, the place or average everything else is measured against, so scoring 100 only means a city's basket costs the same as the base's. Whether that is good for you depends on your income and what you spend it on. A number is only high or low relative to the base, and the base differs between index publishers.
Does a cost of living index include rent?
It depends on the variant, and this is the first thing to check before quoting one. Numbeo publishes both: its Cost of Living Index explicitly excludes rent and mortgage payments, while its Cost of Living Plus Rent Index folds rent in, and the two can rank cities differently. C2ER's US index includes housing as one of its six categories. Two numbers from the same site can describe very different baskets.
Which cost of living index is most accurate?
They are different instruments before they are rivals. Numbeo is crowdsourced and covers cities worldwide; C2ER's index is professionally surveyed but covers the US only; the BEA's Regional Price Parities are official statistics, also US only. Each is authoritative for its own coverage and method, and none of them measures taxes, subsidies or statutory benefits. cityparity vs Numbeo shows where a price index and an equivalence engine give different answers to the same move.
Keep the modest sentence and the number stays useful: a basket, priced in two places, stated against a named base. Everything a relocation decision needs beyond that sentence lives outside the basket, and pretending otherwise is how a good instrument gets a bad reputation. When your own move reaches the salary question, put the index down gently and run the full ledger instead.
Sources. Index definitions and the New York base: Numbeo, About the Cost of Living Indexes; city values from Numbeo's current Europe rankings, retrieved 31 August 2026. C2ER coverage and categories: C2ER, What is COLI; base definition as summarised by STATS Indiana. Regional Price Parities: US Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2024 values. Equivalent salaries and tax figures are 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. See the methodology.