Cost of Living Adjusted Salary Converter (2026)

What the index actually measures

A price level index answers one narrow question: if you bought the same basket of goods and services in each country and paid in the same currency, what would it cost? Eurostat builds it from purchasing power parities, which in turn come from price surveys covering more than 2,000 consumer goods and services, run by each country's national statistical institute to a common specification. The EU27 average is set to 100 and everything else is expressed against it.

This is the part most salary comparisons get wrong, so it is worth being explicit: the index is not inflation. Inflation measures how prices in one country change over time. A price level index measures how prices in one country compare with another at a single moment. A country can have low inflation and a very high price level, which describes Switzerland almost every year.

It is also not an exchange rate, though it contains one. The index is the purchasing power parity divided by the market exchange rate, which is why a euro figure can be scaled by the ratio of two indices with no currency conversion anywhere in the calculation. That property is what makes this converter simple enough to trust: one division, no hidden rate, no undisclosed spread.

The 2025 table

Every country in the Eurostat programme, ordered from most to least expensive. The index is for household final consumption expenditure — what households actually pay out of pocket, which is the basket a salary has to cover.

Eurostat dataset prc_ppp_ind_1, series A.PLI_EU27_2020.E011, reference year 2025. Retrieved 2026-07-30 and transcribed by script rather than by hand. Next Eurostat update: December 2026.

Why the spread is bigger than people expect

Iceland at 173.5 and North Macedonia at 54.8 are 3.2 times apart on the same basket. That is a far wider range than salary conversations usually assume, and it is why a raw salary comparison across borders carries almost no information. A number that looks like a large increase can be a cut, and a number that looks like a cut can be a substantial raise.

The direction matters as much as the size. Moving from a high price level to a low one, you can accept a nominal pay cut and still come out ahead — the calculator's third result line shows exactly how far the same nominal figure stretches once you are living there. Moving the other way, holding your salary flat is a real reduction in what you can buy, and it is the kind that does not appear on a payslip.

Where this stops being enough

Three limits are worth stating plainly, because a converter that hides them produces confident wrong answers.

It is a national average. The gap between a capital city and the rest of a country is frequently larger than the gap between two countries. Treat the result as a country-level baseline you then adjust, not as a final figure for a specific city.

It is one basket, not your basket. The index weights consumption the way an average household consumes. If your spending is unusual — no car, no children, most of your income going to rent — your personal price ratio can differ from the national one by a lot.

It contains no tax whatsoever. This is the most common misreading of any cost-of-living comparison. Prices and taxes are set by different mechanisms and often move in opposite directions: a country can be cheap to live in and expensive to earn in. Portugal sits at 86.6 on prices, but what a freelancer keeps there depends on a coefficient, a social security base and a progressive scale that this page does not touch. Run the two separately and combine them yourself — the five-country net income comparison covers the tax half, and the hourly rate calculator works backwards from the take-home you decide you need.

Why some countries are missing

This tool covers the 39 countries in Eurostat's purchasing power parity programme — the EU27, the EFTA states, candidate countries, and the United States and Japan, which participate in the comparison. The UAE, Singapore and Georgia appear elsewhere on this site but not here, because they are not in that programme.

We could fill those rows from a crowdsourced cost-of-living index. We have not, because it would put a different measurement, built from a different method and a different basket, in the same column as the official one, with nothing on the page telling you which row is which. A short table that means one thing is worth more than a long table that means several.