Portugal, Canada, and the United States were the countries with the highest house price to income ratio in 2024. In all three countries, the index exceeded 130 index points, while the average for all OECD countries stood at 116.2 index points. The index measures the development of housing affordability and is calculated by dividing nominal house price by nominal disposable income per head, with 2015 set as a base year when the index amounted to 100. An index value of 120, for example, would mean that house price growth has outpaced income growth by 20 percent since 2015. How have house prices worldwide changed since the COVID-19 pandemic? House prices started to rise gradually after the global financial crisis (2007–2008), but this trend accelerated with the pandemic. The countries with advanced economies, which usually have mature housing markets, experienced stronger growth than countries with emerging economies. Real house price growth (accounting for inflation) peaked in 2022 and has since lost some of the gain. Although, many countries experienced a decline in house prices, the global house price index shows that property prices in 2023 were still substantially higher than before COVID-19. Renting vs. buying In the past, house prices have grown faster than rents. However, the home affordability has been declining notably, with a direct impact on rental prices. As people struggle to buy a property of their own, they often turn to rental accommodation. This has resulted in a growing demand for rental apartments and soaring rental prices.

The Consumer Sentiment Index in the United States stood at 51 in November 2025. This reflected a drop of 2.6 point from the previous survey. Furthermore, this was its lowest level measured since June 2022. The index is normalized to a value of 100 in December 1964 and based on a monthly survey of consumers, conducted in the continental United States. It consists of about 50 core questions which cover consumers' assessments of their personal financial situation, their buying attitudes and overall economic conditions.

In 2024, the median household income in the United States was 83,730 U.S. dollars. This reflected an increase from the previous year. Household income The median household income depicts the income of households, including the income of the householder and all other individuals aged 15 years or over living in the household. Income includes wages and salaries, unemployment insurance, disability payments, child support payments received, regular rental receipts, as well as any personal business, investment, or other kinds of income received routinely. The median household income in the United States varied from state to state. In 2024, Massachusetts recorded the highest median household income in the country, at 113,900 U.S. dollars. On the other hand, Mississippi, recorded the lowest, at 55,980 U.S. dollars.Household income is also used to determine the poverty rate in the United States. In 2024, 10.6 percent of the U.S. population was living below the national poverty line. This was the lowest level since 2019. Similarly, the child poverty rate, which represents people under the age of 18 living in poverty, reached a three-decade low of 14.3 percent of the children. The state with the widest gap between the rich and the poor was New York, with a Gini coefficient score of 0.52 in 2024. The Gini coefficient is calculated by looking at average income rates. A score of zero would reflect perfect income equality, while a score of one indicates complete inequality.

About This Dataset

This dataset is the original 70-city version used in my first published research paper: “A Data-Driven Survey on Cost of Living and Salary Affordability in Indian Cities” (IJRASET, 2025) Link: https://www.ijraset.com/best-journal/a-datadriven-survey-on-cost-of-livingsalary-affordability-in-indian-cities

It was created using web-scraping techniques from LivingCost.org and converted to INR using a consistent USD→INR exchange rate. This dataset forms the foundational base for affordability analysis, exploratory data analysis (EDA), and benchmarking cost-of-living patterns across India.

The dataset includes 70+ Indian cities, with fields covering living cost, rent, salary, affordability ratio (“months covered”), and derived financial indicators. It is clean, structured, and suitable for beginner to intermediate analytics projects.

Why This Dataset?

This dataset is ideal for:

EDA practice for college & school projects

Correlation and regression analysis

Basic ML tasks (predicting salary, affordability, rent, etc.)

Urban economics mini-projects

Dashboard creation (PowerBI, Tableau)

Data cleaning and preprocessing assignments

It is designed to be simple enough for students but structured enough for real-world analysis.

Features Included

Each row represents a city/state-level affordability profile with:

Cost of living (USD & INR)

Rent for a single person (USD & INR)

Monthly after-tax salary (USD & INR)

Income after rent

“Months Covered” affordability ratio

Source URLs for verification

Exchange rate used

This makes the dataset both transparent and reliable for academic usage.

Data Quality

Web-scraped directly from LivingCost.org

Cleaned and standardized

Currency converted uniformly

Non-city entries flagged

Fully reproducible from the source

This dataset served as the master input for my peer-reviewed paper and has been validated through statistical analysis.

Intended Audience

Students (school, undergraduate, postgraduate)

Data science beginners

Educators needing real datasets for teaching

Analysts looking for quick EDA practice

Researchers exploring affordability or urban economics

Note

A more comprehensive 200+ city enhanced dataset (used in my second paper) will be uploaded soon, including ICT metrics, GDP, and extended affordability indicators.

In 2025, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for medical professional services in the United States was at 432.46, compared to the period from 1982 to 1984 (=100). The CPI for hospital services was at 1,102.12.

Quality of Life Index (higher is better) is an estimation of overall quality of life by using an empirical formula which takes into account purchasing power index (higher is better), pollution index (lower is better), house price to income ratio (lower is better), cost of living index (lower is better), safety index (higher is better), health care index (higher is better), traffic commute time index (lower is better) and climate index (higher is better).

Current formula (written in Java programming language):

index.main = Math.max(0, 100 + purchasingPowerInclRentIndex / 2.5 - (housePriceToIncomeRatio * 1.0) - costOfLivingIndex / 10 + safetyIndex / 2.0 + healthIndex / 2.5 - trafficTimeIndex / 2.0 - pollutionIndex * 2.0 / 3.0 + climateIndex / 3.0);

For details how purchasing power (including rent) index, pollution index, property price to income ratios, cost of living index, safety index, climate index, health index and traffic index are calculated please look up their respective pages.

Formulas used in the past

Formula used between June 2017 and Decembar 2017

We decided to decrease weight from costOfLivingIndex in this formula:

index.main = Math.max(0, 100 + purchasingPowerInclRentIndex / 2.5 - (housePriceToIncomeRatio * 1.0) - costOfLivingIndex / 5 + safetyIndex / 2.0 + healthIndex / 2.5 - trafficTimeIndex / 2.0 - pollutionIndex * 2.0 / 3.0 + climateIndex / 3.0);

The World Happiness 2017, which ranks 155 countries by their happiness levels, was released at the United Nations at an event celebrating International Day of Happiness on March 20th. The report continues to gain global recognition as governments, organizations and civil society increasingly use happiness indicators to inform their policy-making decisions. Leading experts across fields – economics, psychology, survey analysis, national statistics, health, public policy and more – describe how measurements of well-being can be used effectively to assess the progress of nations. The reports review the state of happiness in the world today and show how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness.

The scores are based on answers to the main life evaluation question asked in the poll. This question, known as the Cantril ladder, asks respondents to think of a ladder with the best possible life for them being a 10 and the worst possible life being a 0 and to rate their own current lives on that scale. The scores are from nationally representative samples for 2017 and use the Gallup weights to make the estimates representative. The columns following the happiness score estimate the extent to which each of six factors – economic production, social support, life expectancy, freedom, absence of corruption, and generosity – contribute to making life evaluations higher in each country than they are in Dystopia, a hypothetical country that has values equal to the world’s lowest national averages for each of the six factors. They have no impact on the total score reported for each country, but they do explain why some countries rank higher than others.

Quality of life index, link: https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/indices_explained.jsp

Happiness store, link: https://www.kaggle.com/unsdsn/world-happiness/home

Luxembourg had the highest average monthly salary of employees in the world in 2024 in terms of purchasing power parities (PPP), which takes the average cost of living in a country into account. Belgium followed in second, with the Netherlands in third.

Senior housing communities classed as active adult had the lowest expense ratio in the United States in the first half of 2025. During this period, the expense ratio of this asset class was ** percent, meaning that the operational expenses amounted to ** percent of the income brought in by the property. For facilities with majority nursing care, this percentage was the highest at ** percent.

As of September 2025, Mumbai had the highest cost of living among other cities in the country, with an index value of ****. Gurgaon, a satellite city of Delhi and part of the National Capital Region (NCR) followed it with an index value of ****.  What is cost of living? The cost of living varies depending on geographical regions and factors that affect the cost of living in an area include housing, food, utilities, clothing, childcare, and fuel among others. The cost of living is calculated based on different measures such as the consumer price index (CPI), living cost indexes, and wage price index. CPI refers to the change in the value of consumer goods and services. The wage price index, on the other hand, measures the change in labor services prices due to market pressures. Lastly, the living cost indexes calculate the impact of changing costs on different households. The relationship between wages and costs determines affordability and shifts in the cost of living. Mumbai tops the list Mumbai usually tops the list of most expensive cities in India. As the financial and entertainment hub of the country, Mumbai offers wide opportunities and attracts talent from all over the country. It is the second-largest city in India and has one of the most expensive real estates in the world.

The minimum wage per day guaranteed by law in Mexico was decreed to increase by approximately 12 percent between 2024 and 2025, reaching 278.8 Mexican pesos in 2025. The Northern Free Zone located near the northern border was the exception, where the minimum daily wage increased to 419.88 Mexican pesos. Education and income disparity The income distribution is entirely a new story than minimum wages, in fact, there are many factors that influence the level of salaries for Mexican workers. One of the main differences is by the number of schooling years, someone with more than 18 years of study earns on average double than employees with seven to nine years. Moreover, the area of study, while statistics and finance mean salaries, the highest wages by degree, are above 30,000 Mexican pesos per month, others such as performing arts and theology rank as the lowest paying degrees in Mexico.
Poverty still among the main problems
Despite one of the main reasons for minimum wage increases being moving people out from poverty conditions, poverty continues to be one of the main problems Mexican society faces. The number of people living under poverty conditions has decreased by 8.54 million inhabitants from 2014 to 2022, nonetheless, the figure is still higher than 46.5 million. The poverty rate varies among states, with Chiapas leading the ranking with 67.4 percent of the population under such conditions, while both Baja California and Baja California Sur recorded less than 14 percent.

In 2025, Luxembourg reached the highest score in the quality of life index in Europe, with 220 points. In second place, The Netherlands registered 211 points. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Albania and Ukraine registered the lowest quality of life across Europe with 104 and 115 points respectively. The Quality of Life Index (where a higher score indicates a higher quality of life) is an estimation of overall quality of life, calculated using an empirical formula. This formula considers various factors, including the purchasing power index, pollution index, house price-to-income ratio, cost of living index, safety index, health care index, traffic commute time index, and climate index.

India’s per capita net national income or NNI was around *** thousand rupees in financial year 2025. The annual growth rate was *** percent as compared to the previous year. National income indicators   While GNI (Gross National Income) and NNI are both indicators for a country’s economic performance and welfare, the GNI is related to the GDP plus the net receipts from abroad, including wages and salaries, property income, net taxes and subsidies receivable from abroad. On the other hand, the NNI of a country is equal to its GNI net of depreciation. In 2020, India ranked second amongst the Asia Pacific countries in terms of its gross national income. This has been possible due to a favorable GDP growth in India. Measuring wealth versus welfare   National income per person or per capita is often used as an indicator of people's standard of living and welfare. However, critics object to this by citing that since it is a mean value, it does not reflect the real income distribution. In other words, a small wealthy class of people in the country can skew the per capita income substantially, even though the average population has no change in income. This is exemplified by the fact that in India, the top one percent of people, control over 40 percent of the country’s wealth.

In 2025, the average annual full-time earnings for the top ten percent of earners in the United Kingdom was more than 76,900 British pounds, compared with 23,990 for the bottom ten percent of earners. As of this year, the average annual earnings for all full-time employees was over 39,000 pounds, up from 37,400 pounds in the previous year. Strong wage growth continues in 2025 As of February 2025, wages in the UK were growing by approximately 5.9 percent compared with the previous year, with this falling to 5.6 percent if bonus pay is included. When adjusted for inflation, regular pay without bonuses grew by 2.1 percent, with overall pay including bonus pay rising by 1.9 percent. While UK wages have now outpaced inflation for almost two years, there was a long period between 2021 and 2023 when high inflation in the UK was rising faster than wages, one of the leading reasons behind a severe cost of living crisis at the time. UK's gender pay gap falls in 2024 For several years, the difference between average hourly earnings for men and women has been falling, with the UK's gender pay gap dropping to 13.1 percent in 2024, down from 27.5 percent in 1997. When examined by specific industry sectors, however, the discrepancy between male and female earnings can be much starker. In the financial services sector, for example, the gender pay gap was almost 30 percent, with professional, scientific and technical professions also having a relatively high gender pay gap rate of 20 percent.

The monthly minimum wage in Russia as of January 1, 2025, amounted to ****** Russian rubles, or approximately *** U.S. dollars using the exchange rate as of February 28, 2025. In the capital Moscow, it was set at ****** Russian rubles, or around *** U.S. dollars. In the country's second-largest city, Saint Petersburg, it was lower, at ****** Russian rubles. Since 2021, the minimum wage in Russia has been calculated as 42 percent of the median wage. Between 2018 and 2020, it equaled to the minimum cost of living that was set in the country. The poor and the rich in Russia Around ** million residents lived under the poverty line in Russia. Those earning the highest 20 percent of income accounted for approximately ** percent of the total composite monetary income in 2023, while the group with the lowest income had a ***-percent share. Regional disparities The economic disparity was also observed across Russian federal subjects. The median monthly wage ranged from ****** Russian rubles in the Kabardino-Balkaria Republic to ****** Russian rubles in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug between September 2018 and August 2019. Minimum wage thresholds can be regulated by regional authorities, as long as they are not lower than the federal minimum wage.

Rents in Germany continued to increase in all seven major cities in 2024. The average rent per square meter in Munich was approximately **** euros — the highest in the country. Conversely, Düsseldorf had the most affordable rent, at approximately **** euros per square meter. But how does renting compare to buying? According to the house price to rent ratio, house prices in Germany have risen faster than rents, making renting more affordable than buying. Affordability of housing in Germany In 2023, Germany was among the European countries with a relatively high house price to income ratio in Europe. The indicator compares the affordability of housing across OECD countries and is calculated as the nominal house prices divided by nominal disposable income per head, with 2015 chosen as a base year. Between 2012 and 2022, property prices in the country rose much faster than income, with the house price to income index peaking at *** index points at the beginning of 2022. Slower house price growth in the following years has led to the index declining, as incomes catch up. Nevertheless, homebuyers in 2024 faced significantly higher mortgage interest rates, contributing to a higher final cost. How much does buying a property in Germany cost? Just as with renting, Munich was the most expensive city for newly built apartments. In 2024, the cost per square meter in Munich was almost ***** euros pricier than in the runner-up city, Frankfurt. Detached and semi-detached houses are usually more expensive. The price gap between Munich and the second most expensive city, Stuttgart, was nearly ***** euros per square meter.

The national minimum wage for federal workers in Nigeria reached ****** Nigerian naira (NGN) in 2024, which equaled about ** U.S. dollars. On July 23, 2024, this minimum wage of ****** NGN was passed into law, increasing from the previous amount of ****** NGN. According to most recent data, the monthly cost of living for an individual in Nigeria amounted to ****** NGN on average, whereas this figure added up to over ******* NGN for a family. Dependency ratio In 2023, the labor dependency ratio in Nigeria was estimated at *** percent, showing no significant change since 2012. This metric represents the proportion of dependents who are either not part of the workforce or are unemployed, in relation to the total employed population. Nigeria's compensation trends and workload statistics In 2023, individuals working in executive management and change roles garnered the highest average annual salary in Nigeria at ****** U.S. dollars. In the same year, the employed workforce in Nigeria contributed to a collective weekly workload exceeding *** billion hours. Two years earlier, the workload was estimated at about *** billion hours.

In the three months to August 2025, average weekly earnings in the United Kingdom grew by 4.7 percent. In the same month, the inflation rate for the Consumer Price Index was 3.8 percent, indicating that wages were rising faster than prices that month. Average salaries in the UK In 2024, the average salary for full-time workers in the UK was 37,430 British pounds a year, up from 34,963 in the previous year. In London, the average annual salary was far higher than the rest of the country, at 47,455 pounds per year, compared with just 32,960 in North East England. There also still exists a noticeable gender pay gap in the UK, which was seven percent for full-time workers in 2024, down from 7.5 percent in 2023. Lastly, the monthly earnings of the top one percent in the UK was 15,887 pounds as of November 2024, far higher than even that of the average for the top five percent, who earned 7,641 pounds per month, while pay for the lowest 10 percent of earners was just 805 pounds per month. Waves of industrial action in the UK One of the main consequences of high inflation and low wage growth throughout 2022 and 2023 was an increase in industrial action in the UK. In December 2022, for example, there were approximately 830,000 working days lost due to labor disputes. Throughout this month, workers across various industry sectors were involved in industrial disputes, such as nurses, train drivers, and driving instructors. Many of the workers who took part in strikes were part of the UK's public sector, which saw far weaker wage growth than that of the private sector throughout 2022. Widespread industrial action continued into 2023, with approximately 303,000 workers involved in industrial disputes in March 2023. There was far less industrial action by 2024, however, due to settlements in many of the disputes, although some are ongoing as of 2025.