Cost of living by country: the dataset
What US$100 buys in 176 countries, as a free CSV or JSON download. No sign-up, no key; exchange rates as of 30 Sep 2026 (refreshed daily).
What's in it
- price_level — World Bank PPP conversion factor, carried forward from its year by the gap between local and US inflation, divided by the market exchange rate. 1.00 means prices match the US, 0.50 means half.
- usd100_buys — the local purchasing power of US$100, in US dollars. Vietnam sits near US$370.
- Plus the inputs, so you can check the arithmetic: PPP factor and its year, GDP per capita and its year, the currency used, the currency the PPP factor is quoted in (
ppp_unit), the inflation rate and its year (inflation_pct,inflation_year), and the carry-forward multiplier it produced (inflation_factor, 1 when there is no current figure).
Comparing from somewhere else? Divide one price_level by the other: Vietnam 0.27 ÷ Germany 0.80 ≈ 0.34, so prices are about a third of Germany's. The Data tab does this for your home currency. Join on iso; country uses World Bank naming.
Why it differs from other PPP tables
Most purchasing-power figures are a snapshot: prices and exchange rates from the year the PPP was published, so they drift as both move. This carries the PPP factor forward for inflation and divides by today's market rate. A country shows up cheaper here than in a year-old table only when its currency has fallen faster than its prices have risen (beyond US inflation); where prices outran the currency, it shows up pricier.
What it is not
These are national averages for residents. Neighbourhoods popular with visitors, and rent paid by foreigners, run well above them — useful for comparing countries against each other, not as a travel budget.
Countries whose exchange rate is a managed peg, or otherwise so far out of line with their income that the result would be fictional, are left out rather than guessed at. That is why the count is 176 and not every country on earth.
Sources and licence
PPP conversion factors, consumer-price inflation and GDP per capita from the World Bank (data.worldbank.org, CC BY 4.0); exchange rates from fxratesapi.com. The derived figures are free to reuse with attribution to WanderGrade.