Cost-of-living rankings · Eurostat PLI 2023
Cost-of-living rankings
Rank 31 European countries by overall cost of living and by category, rent, groceries, transport, healthcare, utilities and dining, plus income and real affordability. Every number is a Eurostat price level (EU-27 = 100), directly comparable across borders.
- Countries ranked
- 31
- Ranking views
- 12
- Baseline
- EU-27 = 100
- #1 cheapest
- Bulgaria
The verdict
Bulgaria is the cheapest overall at index 57 (EU-27 = 100), ahead of Romania at 57; the Top 5 cutoff is 73 across 31 European countries.
- 57
- #1 Bulgaria
- 57
- #2 Romania
- 73
- Top 5 cutoff
- 12
- Ranking views
Figures are live from Eurostat comparative price levels, open any ranking below for the full ordered list.
Where expensive Europe pulls away
Mean category price-level gap (index points) between the Under-85 band (10 countries) and the 120+ band (10 countries). Eurostat PLI vernacular, not a share strip.
Category index gap · Under-85 vs 120+
Europe by cost-index band
Exclusive partition of all 31 published countries on the EU-27 = 100 scale. Orthogonal to the Top-5 cheapest bar and the category-gap chart above.
How these rankings are compiled
Each ranking is computed directly from Eurostat's comparative price-level data, the same harmonised methodology used to compare the cost of a standardised basket of goods and services across countries, with the EU-27 average set to 100. We do not blend editorial opinion or proprietary signals; the underlying figure for every country is visible on its profile page so you can verify it. Rankings recompute whenever the upstream Eurostat data refreshes.
Why a price-level index, not raw prices
Raw local prices are misleading across borders: exchange rates move, and consumption patterns differ. A comparative price-level index removes both problems by pricing the same basket everywhere and expressing it relative to the EU-27 average. An index of 120 means prices are roughly 20% above the EU norm; an index of 80 means about 20% below. That makes a country in Eastern Europe genuinely comparable to one in the Nordics, which raw euro figures never are.
Cheap to live in is not the same as best value
The cheapest countries on the overall list are often those with lower incomes, so a low price level does not automatically mean a high standard of living. The best-value ranking addresses this by dividing median net income by the local price level, a measure of how far a typical income actually stretches. Reading the cost rankings alongside the income and best-value rankings gives a far more honest picture than any single list.
Category rankings matter as much as the headline
A country's overall index can hide large category differences. Somewhere with cheap groceries and transport may still have expensive rent, which dominates most household budgets. That is why we publish category rankings, rent, groceries, transport, healthcare, utilities and dining, separately. If housing is your biggest concern, the rent ranking is more useful than the overall one; if you eat out often, the dining ranking matters more. Open any country profile to see all categories side by side.
Read our methodology - how these Eurostat figures are sourced and computed.
Open Data
Download the compiled country price-level extract as country-cost-statistics.csv (same CSV as the homepage and /statistics Dataset).