This is a comparison of the cost of living in various cities, as gathered by popular site numbeo. All data belongs to them and has been shared with permission

Currency is Euro

A 2025 study analyzed the cheapest cities to visit in Europe by calculating the average price of a series of products, services, and activities. Overall, Riga, in Latvia, ranked as the cheapest European travel destination, with an average daily cost of around *** British pounds. Vilnius, in Lithuania, followed in second place, with an average cost of roughly *** British pounds per day.

Annual indexes of price differences between 15 cities in all provinces and territories, as of October of the previous year, for a selection of products (goods and services) from the Consumer Price Index (CPI) purchased by consumers in each of the 15 cities. The combined city average index is 100.

How much more expensive are houses in European capital cities than in the rest of the country? Of all the capital cities in Europe, prices in Paris had the highest disproportion to the national average in 2023. A new house in the French capital cost more than ***** times the price of a house outside the city. This was followed by Barcelona, Munich and Athens.

West Virginia and Kansas had the lowest cost of living across all U.S. states, with composite costs being half of those found in Hawaii. This was according to a composite index that compares prices for various goods and services on a state-by-state basis. In West Virginia, the cost of living index amounted to **** — well below the national benchmark of 100. Virginia— which had an index value of ***** — was only slightly above that benchmark. Expensive places to live included Hawaii, Massachusetts, and California. Housing costs in the U.S. Housing is usually the highest expense in a household’s budget. In 2023, the average house sold for approximately ******* U.S. dollars, but house prices in the Northeast and West regions were significantly higher. Conversely, the South had some of the least expensive housing. In West Virginia, Mississippi, and Louisiana, the median price of the typical single-family home was less than ******* U.S. dollars. That makes living expenses in these states significantly lower than in states such as Hawaii and California, where housing is much pricier. What other expenses affect the cost of living? Utility costs such as electricity, natural gas, water, and internet also influence the cost of living. In Alaska, Hawaii, and Connecticut, the average monthly utility cost exceeded *** U.S. dollars. That was because of the significantly higher prices for electricity and natural gas in these states.

Of the most populous cities in the U.S., San Jose, California had the highest annual income requirement at ******* U.S. dollars annually for homeowners to have an affordable and comfortable life in 2024. This can be compared to Houston, Texas, where homeowners needed an annual income of ****** U.S. dollars in 2024.

Dataset Overview

This dataset provides historical housing price indices for the United States, covering a span of 20 years from January 2000 onwards. The data includes housing price trends at the national level, as well as for major metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and more. It is ideal for understanding how housing prices have evolved over time and exploring regional differences in the housing market.

Why This Dataset?

The U.S. housing market has experienced significant shifts over the last two decades, influenced by economic booms, recessions, and post-pandemic recovery. This dataset allows data enthusiasts, economists, and real estate professionals to analyze long-term trends, make forecasts, and derive insights into regional housing markets.

What’s Included?

Time Period: January 2000 to the latest available data (specific end date depends on the dataset). Frequency: Monthly data. Regions Covered: 20+ U.S. cities, states, and aggregates.

Columns Description

Each column represents the housing price index for a specific region or aggregate, starting with a date column:

Date: Represents the date of the housing price index measurement, recorded with a monthly frequency. U.S. National: The national-level housing price index for the United States. 20-City Composite: The aggregate housing price index for the top 20 metropolitan areas in the U.S. CA-San Francisco: The housing price index for San Francisco, California. CA-Los Angeles: The housing price index for Los Angeles, California. WA-Seattle: The housing price index for Seattle, Washington. NY-New York: The housing price index for New York City, New York. Additional Columns: The dataset includes more columns with housing price indices for various U.S. cities, which can be viewed in the full dataset preview.

Potential Use Cases

Time-Series Analysis: Investigate long-term trends and patterns in housing prices. Forecasting: Build predictive models to forecast future housing prices using historical data. Regional Comparisons: Analyze how housing prices have grown in different cities over time. Economic Insights: Correlate housing prices with economic factors like interest rates, GDP, and inflation.

Who Can Use This Dataset?

This dataset is perfect for:

Data scientists and machine learning practitioners looking to build forecasting models. Economists and policymakers analyzing housing market dynamics. Real estate investors and analysts studying regional trends in housing prices.

Example Questions to Explore

Which cities have experienced the highest housing price growth over the last 20 years? How do housing price trends in coastal cities (e.g., Los Angeles, Miami) compare to midwestern cities (e.g., Chicago, Detroit)? Can we predict future housing prices using time-series models like ARIMA or Prophet?

A table comparing the cost of living in various European Union countries, including expenses for rent, utilities, food, and transportation in major cities

VITAL SIGNS INDICATOR List Rents (EC9)

FULL MEASURE NAME List Rents

LAST UPDATED October 2016

DESCRIPTION List rent refers to the advertised rents for available rental housing and serves as a measure of housing costs for new households moving into a neighborhood, city, county or region.

DATA SOURCE real Answers (1994 – 2015) no link

Zillow Metro Median Listing Price All Homes (2010-2016) http://www.zillow.com/research/data/

CONTACT INFORMATION vitalsigns.info@mtc.ca.gov

METHODOLOGY NOTES (across all datasets for this indicator) List rents data reflects median rent prices advertised for available apartments rather than median rent payments; more information is available in the indicator definition above. Regional and local geographies rely on data collected by real Answers, a research organization and database publisher specializing in the multifamily housing market. real Answers focuses on collecting longitudinal data for individual rental properties through quarterly surveys. For the Bay Area, their database is comprised of properties with 40 to 3,000+ housing units. Median list prices most likely have an upward bias due to the exclusion of smaller properties. The bias may be most extreme in geographies where large rental properties represent a small portion of the overall rental market. A map of the individual properties surveyed is included in the Local Focus section.

Individual properties surveyed provided lower- and upper-bound ranges for the various types of housing available (studio, 1 bedroom, 2 bedroom, etc.). Median lower- and upper-bound prices are determined across all housing types for the regional and county geographies. The median list price represented in Vital Signs is the average of the median lower- and upper-bound prices for the region and counties. Median upper-bound prices are determined across all housing types for the city geographies. The median list price represented in Vital Signs is the median upper-bound price for cities. For simplicity, only the mean list rent is displayed for the individual properties. The metro areas geography rely upon Zillow data, which is the median price for rentals listed through www.zillow.com during the month. Like the real Answers data, Zillow's median list prices most likely have an upward bias since small properties are underrepresented in Zillow's listings. The metro area data for the Bay Area cannot be compared to the regional Bay Area data. Due to afore mentioned data limitations, this data is suitable for analyzing the change in list rents over time but not necessarily comparisons of absolute list rents. Metro area boundaries reflects today’s metro area definitions by county for consistency, rather than historical metro area boundaries.

Due to the limited number of rental properties surveyed, city-level data is unavailable for Atherton, Belvedere, Brisbane, Calistoga, Clayton, Cloverdale, Cotati, Fairfax, Half Moon Bay, Healdsburg, Hillsborough, Los Altos Hills, Monte Sereno, Moranga, Oakley, Orinda, Portola Valley, Rio Vista, Ross, San Anselmo, San Carlos, Saratoga, Sebastopol, Windsor, Woodside, and Yountville.

Inflation-adjusted data are presented to illustrate how rents have grown relative to overall price increases; that said, the use of the Consumer Price Index does create some challenges given the fact that housing represents a major chunk of consumer goods bundle used to calculate CPI. This reflects a methodological tradeoff between precision and accuracy and is a common concern when working with any commodity that is a major component of CPI itself. Percent change in inflation-adjusted median is calculated with respect to the median price from the fourth quarter or December of the base year.

VITAL SIGNS INDICATOR Home Prices (EC7)

FULL MEASURE NAME Home Prices

LAST UPDATED August 2019

DESCRIPTION Home prices refer to the cost of purchasing one’s own house or condominium. While a significant share of residents may choose to rent, home prices represent a primary driver of housing affordability in a given region, county or city.

DATA SOURCE Zillow Median Sale Price (1997-2018) http://www.zillow.com/research/data/

Bureau of Labor Statistics: Consumer Price Index All Urban Consumers Data Table (1997-2018; specific to each metro area) http://data.bls.gov

CONTACT INFORMATION vitalsigns.info@bayareametro.gov

METHODOLOGY NOTES (across all datasets for this indicator) Median housing price estimates for the region, counties, cities, and zip code come from analysis of individual home sales by Zillow. The median sale price is the price separating the higher half of the sales from the lower half. In other words, 50 percent of home sales are below or above the median value. Zillow defines all homes as single-family residential, condominium, and co-operative homes with a county record. Single-family residences are detached, which means the home is an individual structure with its own lot. Condominiums are units that you own in a multi-unit complex, such as an apartment building. Co-operative homes are slightly different from condominiums where the homeowners own shares in the corporation that owns the building, not the actual units themselves.

For metropolitan area comparison values, the Bay Area metro area’s median home sale price is the population-weighted average of the nine counties’ median home prices. Home sales prices are not reliably available for Houston, because Texas is a non-disclosure state. For more information on non-disclosure states, see: http://www.zillow.com/blog/chronicles-of-data-collection-ii-non-disclosure-states-3783/

Inflation-adjusted data are presented to illustrate how home prices have grown relative to overall price increases; that said, the use of the Consumer Price Index does create some challenges given the fact that housing represents a major chunk of consumer goods bundle used to calculate CPI. This reflects a methodological tradeoff between precision and accuracy and is a common concern when working with any commodity that is a major component of CPI itself.

Poland's average transaction prices for a dwelling are shown as 100 percent. The average prices in nearly all of the main cities in Poland were higher than the country average. The highest prices for a dwelling were seen in Warsaw.

Zurich, Lausanne, and Geneva were ranked as the most expensive cities worldwide with indices of ************************ Almost half of the 11 most expensive cities were in Switzerland.

Detailed cost of living comparison between Mexico and Gibraltar

Analysis of ‘Property Prices Index By City 2009 to 2021’ provided by Analyst-2 (analyst-2.ai), based on source dataset retrieved from https://www.kaggle.com/jolenech/property-prices-index-by-city-2009-to-2021 on 13 February 2022.

--- Dataset description provided by original source is as follows ---

Context

I wanted to see how affordable housing is across countries and wanted to compare the price of housing. But I could not find a properly documented and easily downloaded dataset hence I created one with the help of web-scraping with Python and Pandas.

Content

I spent a lot of time searching for a source for the information I wanted in order to compare affordability. I stumbled upon a great website which was exactly what I was looking for Numbeo The website has a lot of details like affordability index, prime to income ratio, price to rent ratios in and out of city centre and more!

Now I had the data, I needed to download it. Since I couldn't get the raw form of the data, I did web scraping in order to get details in the table for 2009 to 2021 using a for loop to go through all links and create csv files for every year.

What's in the dataset?

Details of columns Note: There are a few null values in the 2009 dataset (mortgage and Affordability Index columns.

Check out the code I used on Github.

Acknowledgements

I couldn't have gotten the data without Numbeo!

Inspiration

I was working on a project trying to see if Price of Housing in Singapore can be justified and wanted more data that's global instead of just from Singapore. Let me know if you have any questions!

--- Original source retains full ownership of the source dataset ---

Historical Dataset of Cities Project High School is provided by PublicSchoolReview and contain statistics on metrics:Total Students Trends Over Years (2005-2009),Distribution of Students By Grade Trends,American Indian Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (2006-2008),Asian Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (2005-2008),Hispanic Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (2005-2009),Black Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (2005-2009),White Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (2005-2009),Diversity Score Comparison Over Years (2005-2009),Free Lunch Eligibility Comparison Over Years (2007-2009),Reduced-Price Lunch Eligibility Comparison Over Years (2007-2009)

One key analytical tool used by the City Council and City staff is a comparison of the average costs incurred by homeowners in several cities throughout the Valley. The average charges for the current fiscal year for various cities are compared with the average costs for the current fiscal year in the City of Mesa. While some neighboring municipalities have a different resource mix than Mesa, bringing them all together allows for comparison to ensure that Mesa remains an affordable place to live, work and play. Sources include applicable Tax Year Limited Property Value, Maricopa County Assessor's Office, and Maricopa County Tax Levy and Rates page. The Average Homeowner’s Annual Cost Comparison Notes: • The City of Mesa and the Town of Gilbert are the only municipalities that do not have a primary property tax. All other revenue sources exist in all municipalities. • Estimated city sales taxes paid is based on average household expenditures from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey applied to each city’s sales tax rate. Some cities have different rates for different taxable items. Mesa does not collect sales tax on the sale of food for consumption at home. • Comparisons are determined using a standard service level for all cities. • Standard solid waste charges are for twice per week garbage (and recyclables where applicable) collection using 90 gallon barrels. Solid Waste residential charges include a Green and Clean fee for Mesa. • Other city’s environmental fees are included as applicable. • Charges are based on FY 16/17 annual average usage of 8,900 water gallons per month, ranging from 6,000 in winter to 12,000 in summer. • Wastewater charges are based on the average consumption of water during the winter months. SEE ATTACHMENT FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Historical Dataset of Big Picture Twin Cities is provided by PublicSchoolReview and contain statistics on metrics:Total Students Trends Over Years (2019-2023),Distribution of Students By Grade Trends,Asian Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (2019-2023),Hispanic Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (2019-2023),Black Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (2019-2023),White Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (2019-2023),Two or More Races Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (2019-2023),Diversity Score Comparison Over Years (2019-2023),Free Lunch Eligibility Comparison Over Years (2019-2023),Reduced-Price Lunch Eligibility Comparison Over Years (2019-2023)

Large white, Grade A chicken eggs, sold in a carton of a dozen. Includes organic, non-organic, cage free, free range, and traditional."

Graph and download economic data for Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Food at Home in U.S. City Average (CUSR0000SAF11) from Jan 1952 to Jul 2025 about food, urban, consumer, CPI, housing, inflation, price index, indexes, price, and USA.

Detailed cost of living comparison between Mexico and Guatemala