Cost Of Living Comparison (?)

This is an attempt to create a relative cost of living index for Chinese cities. It's based on the US government official per diem rates for travel in China. Those numbers are assuming hotel stays, restaurant meals etc. and therefore probably have little meaning for us in themselves, so I've indexed them to the "Other China Average" numbers in order to show proportions. If some of these numbers seem high, remember that these are all major business and/or international tourist destinations...they're going to be higher than Nowheresville.

This ain't gospel, folks...it's intended to be a very general rule of thumb. I'd be especially suspicious of the Housing numbers since they're based ultimately on hotel rates. If you think of the "housing" here as nicer, rich-western-expat-type apartments these numbers may not be so far off the mark. Also be aware that while most of this data is pretty fresh, some of it is apparently a bit older. I think utilities are built into housing here, too...for example, in Harbin water and heat are quite large expenses!

But I hope it'll be a good general guide to relative costs for different places in China. (By the way, Suzhou probably falls somewhere between Nanjing and Hangzhou...) I guess a good way to read this would be "What will cost me 100 RMB to live in Bumfuq, China will cost me 204 RMB in Shanghai."

	Housing	Other	Total
Beijing	220	130	176
Chengdu	185	116	151
Chongqing	144	122	133
Dalian	162	124	143
Fuzhou	133	90	112
Guangzhou	148	160	154
Guilin	182	144	164
Hangzhou	194	83	140
Harbin	152	89	121
Kunming	200	94	148
Lhasa	170	78	125
Lijiang	214	79	148
Nanjing	180	105	143
Shanghai	241	165	204
Shantou	135	79	108
Shenyang	145	132	139
Shenzhen	165	159	162
Tianjin	133	140	136
Xiamen	135	83	109
Xian	97	87	92
Other China Avg	100	100	100

Time to bubble this post back up.
This data is pretty old, but the ratios between the cities are probably still pretty valid.

Here's a site where you can compare COL for different cities in different countries in different currencies in much more detail:

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_result.jsp?country1=China&country2=United+States&displayCurrency=CNY

P.S. It's slow to load from China if you're not using a VPN because it has a twitter link on the page. Be patient; it will load.

Outstanding resource, Lao San. This is one for the Links Pages.

Play around with the site a bit...you can compare Chinese and Foreign cities as well as between Chinese cities!

Aaaand it's there. Thanks, Lao San.
Also did some overdue updating on the Links there.

Many people don't seem to know this, ( ) but we do have a Links page. A rather nice one, if I may say so.
You should check it out!

If you have a resource as massively useful as the one old34 sent us, by all means PM it to me for inclusion in our Links!

Very very interesting site. Thanks!