WealthMetric
Personal Finance
WealthMetric

City Cost of Living Comparison

Temporarily disabled — we found a data accuracy issue and pulled the calculator while we fix it properly.

Why this is offline
This tool compared cities using the Labour Bureau's CPI-IW "Centre Wise General Index," which rebases each city's own index independently to 100 in the base year (2016). That means one city showing a higher index number than another does not mean it's currently more expensive — it only means that city's own prices have risen more since its own 2016 starting point. We were using the ratio of two cities' index numbers as if it measured their current relative cost, which is not a valid use of this data (the same reason you can't compare one country's CPI number directly against another's).
We haven't found an open, safely-licensed dataset that validly compares absolute cost of living across Indian cities — this turns out to be a genuinely hard data problem, not something we cut a corner on. Rather than show a plausible-looking but wrong number, we've taken the calculator down until we have something we're confident in.
💡 Looking for how far your money goes in a different country instead of a different Indian city? Try the PPP Calculator — it's built on World Bank data designed specifically for cross-country price-level comparison, which doesn't have this problem.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is this calculator offline?
We built it on the Labour Bureau's CPI-IW centre-wise index, but each centre in that index is independently rebased to 100 in its own base year — so a higher index number in one city doesn't mean it's actually more expensive than a city with a lower number, only that its own prices have risen more since its own starting point. We were using the ratio of two cities' numbers as a cost comparison, which isn't a valid use of that data, so we took the tool down rather than leave a misleading number live.
Will this come back?
We're looking for an open, safely-licensed dataset that genuinely supports comparing absolute cost of living across Indian cities. That turns out to be a harder data problem than it looks — most sources with this kind of city-level granularity (e.g. Numbeo) are commercially licensed and not safely reusable here. We'd rather ship nothing than ship a wrong number.
Is there an alternative on this site?
If you're comparing purchasing power across countries rather than Indian cities, the PPP Calculator uses World Bank data built specifically for cross-country price-level comparison, which doesn't have this issue.