Try it — pick a city, enter a salary
Same easy comparison, but with your real take-home pay and the neighborhoods you can actually afford. No account required.
The short version
Expatistan does one thing cleanly: line up two cities and show how their prices compare. For a quick gut-check between, say, Berlin and Lisbon, it's fast and easy, and it covers a lot of cities from its community submissions.
But a price ratio isn't a moving decision. Two things decide whether a city works for you: how much of your salary you actually keep after tax, and what you can rent in a neighborhood you'd want to live in. Crowdsourced comparison tools — Expatistan and Numbeo alike — answer neither.
AffordWhere keeps the side-by-side comparison and adds a per-country tax engine for net pay, neighborhood-level rent across 1,400+ neighborhoods, and official-source data you can verify. Narrower coverage, but answers you can act on.
AffordWhere vs Expatistan
Comparison as of 2026.
| Feature | AffordWhere | Expatistan |
|---|---|---|
| Primary data source | Official government statistics | Crowdsourced — prices submitted by users |
| Net salary after tax | Yes — per-country tax engine | No |
| Neighborhood-level rent | Yes — 1,400+ neighborhoods | City-level only |
| City-to-city comparison | Yes — rent, tax, and budget | Yes — its core feature |
| Verifiable sources | Every figure attributed | User-submitted, unverified |
| City coverage | 250 cities, 45 countries | Hundreds of cities worldwide |
| Account required | No | No (to browse) |
| Price | Free | Free to browse |
Which should you use?
Use Expatistanfor a fast, broad price ratio between two cities when you don't need tax or neighborhood detail.
Use AffordWherewhen you're seriously weighing a move and need the full picture: net salary after tax, real neighborhood rent, and official-source data — for any of our 45 countries.
We put the numbers to the test: how Expatistan, Numbeo and five other tools compare. Our sources are listed on the data sources page.
Keep exploring
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free alternative to Expatistan?
Yes. AffordWhere is free and requires no account. Like Expatistan it compares cities, but it adds two things crowdsourced tools leave out: your net salary after tax (via a per-country tax engine) and rent broken down by neighborhood. The underlying prices come from official government statistics rather than user submissions.
Expatistan vs Numbeo vs AffordWhere — what is the difference?
Expatistan and Numbeo are both crowdsourced: users submit prices, which gives wide coverage but unverified, sometimes stale figures, and neither shows your take-home pay. AffordWhere is built on official government data (Eurostat, OECD, SCB, Destatis, ONS, INSEE), calculates net salary after income tax and social contributions, and breaks rent down to the neighborhood. Fewer cities, but every number is sourced and your real budget is part of the answer.
Is Expatistan accurate?
Expatistan offers clean, easy city-to-city comparisons, and for popular cities its crowdsourced averages are a reasonable rough guide. The limitation is the same as any user-submitted dataset: figures are unverified and depend on how many people contributed for a given city. AffordWhere trades some breadth for figures that trace back to official statistical sources you can check yourself.
What does AffordWhere do that Expatistan does not?
Three things: (1) net salary after tax for each country, so you see what you keep, not just what things cost; (2) neighborhood-level rent across 1,400+ neighborhoods, not a single city average; and (3) official-source data with full attribution. Everything runs in your browser, with no account and nothing stored.
What does Expatistan do better?
Simplicity and reach. Expatistan's side-by-side city comparison is clean and covers a large number of cities worldwide from its community data. If you just want a quick, broad cost ratio between two cities and don't need tax or neighborhood detail, it does that well.