Verify the number before you build a life on it

Search “cost of living in [any city]” and you will get a single confident number — often built from a handful of tourist-priced listings, a crowd database with seven contributors, or a blogger’s one month in 2023. Two sources can differ by a factor of two and both be “right” about different things. This guide is the set of checks we apply to every figure before it prints on Settled Overseas — written down so you can apply the same checks to anyone’s numbers, including ours. The method is the point; it is also described on How we research.

Check 1: Asking rent is not paid rent

Most published “rents” are asking prices from listings. Landlords ask; tenants negotiate; the signed lease is a third number nobody publishes. Asking rents still tell you the shape of a market — which neighbourhoods, which tier — but a budget built on asking rents should say so on its face. Ours do: every rent on this site is labelled a dated asking-rent sample, and we print the capture date next to it.

Check 2: A median and a sample answer different questions

Portugal shows the cleanest example. The national statistics institute (INE) publishes medians of newly signed leases; the portal Idealista publishes medians of asking rents. For Lisbon in 2026 those two series sit side by side on our Portugal page — a one-bedroom asking median of €1,409/month (Idealista, Q2 2026) — and they are never blended, because one measures what people signed and the other what landlords hope for. When a source won’t tell you which of the two it is, treat the number as decoration.

Check 3: Whose basket, whose neighbourhood?

A furnished two-bedroom in the expat district and an unfurnished local lease across town are different products at different prices. Samples skew to furnished, expat-facing stock because that is what English-language portals list; Spanish- or Portuguese-language local search routinely finds a cheaper market underneath. A figure that doesn’t say which stock it sampled — size, furnishing, district — is hiding its biggest variable.

Check 4: The date, and the exchange rate behind it

Rents are re-priced, currencies drift, and a dollar figure silently bakes in the exchange rate of the day it was converted. Our Colombia pages convert at the official rate of the capture date and print it (COP 3,238.88 = US$1, 8 October 2026); our Dominican Republic article converts at RD$60.61 and says pesos are the real prices. Any cost figure older than about a year, or converted at an unstated rate, should be re-based before it enters a budget.

Check 5: Sample size is part of the number

A “city average” built on two listings is not an average; it is two listings. Where our samples are thin, the page prints the listings themselves and labels the gap instead of computing a summary — Cali’s page, for instance, prints three dated listings and a portal average, and states plainly that no couple budget is built from them. Prefer any source that shows its n over one that shows only its conclusion.

The five-question checklist

1. Is this asking, signed, or actually paid — and does the source say which?
2. What exactly was sampled — size, furnishing, district, date captured?
3. How many observations sit under this figure?
4. What date, and what exchange rate, produced the dollar number?
5. What would make this figure wrong for my household — and is that case printed or hidden?

Run those five against the numbers in any guide, video, or dossier — ours included. The sources that survive them are the ones worth planning a life on. That standard, applied country by country, is what the country pages and the dossier are built from.

More free guides

Free, in full, and held to the same standard as everything on this site:

• How we research
• Banking abroad & the FBAR: the two reports, plainly
• Residency routes, compared as families
• Mexico vs. Portugal: the honest comparison