I don't understand this data at all. All of the rich Western European countries has over 200h required work per month, but I don't know of anyone in my country (high or low income) working more than roughly 40h per week.
On “average” wages: The chart uses a typical/median (net) hourly wage, not the mean. Means are pulled up by high earners, and many HN readers sit above the median. so your personal “hours to basics” will look lower than the chart. Using the mean would systematically understate hours for the typical worker, especially in unequal countries. Also note: the index assumes a single renter; couples/roommates or employer subsidies will reduce hours per person.
The wage structure is very flat in my country, the average wage is only around 15% higher than the median. The median wage is very livable on. For essential or basic needs I would estimate you would only need ~70% of the median wage.
I appreciate that I could be biased, and my guesses could be off, but we're talking about almost a factor two here. If the numbers would be correct the average person does not even have enough money for the minimum essentials every month, which is extremely far from what I see and hear.
You’re right to sanity-check. Our number is hours of pay needed for a single renter on a new lease, not hours actually worked.
Using your own anchors: if essentials ≈ 70% of median net pay and an effective month is ~140 paid hours (vacation/holidays), then
hours = 0.7 × 140 ≈ 98h — nowhere near 200h.
So why would our Nordic rows show >200h? Likely method artifacts:
Rent input: we used current market 1-BR rents (upper bound). Many people have in-place/regulated rents, own, or share, which slashes hours per person.
Hour divisor: some wage series forced monthly ÷ 160–168h instead of ~140 effective hours → inflates the ratio ~10–20%.
Geography mix: capital-city prices vs national wages can overstate costs.
You have 190 hours for Switzerland. The average full time job here is 42 hours a week at most. 4x42 = 168. Not a single person living here is working 190 hours to cover their basic needs. Sorry but your numbers are complete bullshit. No idea why this is on the front page.
Author here. you’re right to flag Switzerland. Our metric is hours of pay for a single new-lease renter, not hours actually worked. But 190 h for Switzerland still looks too high given official anchors.
Quick back-of-envelope with public data:
Typical pay: Median gross ≈ CHF 6,788/mo (FSO). OECD shows the net take-home for an average single worker is ~82% of gross; using actual hours worked ~1,529/yr ⇒ ~CHF 44 net/hour.
Starter basket (monthly): national rent avg ≈ CHF 1,451 (all dwellings; new leases in Zurich can be ~1,7–2,1k), utilities ~CHF 220, basic groceries ~CHF 500–700, Zurich monthly pass CHF 89. That totals roughly CHF 2.3–2.9k.
Hours of pay needed = basket ÷ net hourly ≈ 50–70 h, not ~190 h. (E.g., CHF 2,600 ÷ CHF 44 ≈ 59 h.)
Using a flat 2,080 h/year to derive hourly pay (instead of actual ~1,529) depresses hourly pay and pushes hours up, which likely inflated our Switzerland row.
Mixing capital-city pricing with national wages can also bias upward.
We’ll correct the Switzerland entry and add a footnote showing the actual-hours denominator we used. Appreciate the nudge.
There is a social meme going around about Mississippi being wealthier than Bordeaux, France [1] that relates to the “Mississippi Question" (the question is whether a country is poorer than Mississippi, which is used as a benchmark for low income and wealth within the U.S). Broadly speaking, it speaks to GDP and economic numbers being poor metrics for tracking happiness and quality of life [2] [3] [4]. Mississippi GDP per capita is higher than Spain, Italy, the UK, and France; where would you rather live as a human?
Edit: I do like that this uses time as a measure versus fiat; fiat can be gamed, time consumed to meet a need cannot.
Otherwise Oklahoma would be last in basically every single metric used to compare states. It was more true then than now. Mississippi made major changes to their education system and it has been paying off. I'm not to familiar with how they are doing on other metrics.
But more importantly, it ignores what you can do with the extra hours you work.. same as with PPP it ignores that an iPhone isn't cheaper (it may not be a basic necessity), but many globally traded goods that go beyond basic needs aren't affected by PPP.
Scope note: This index is a floor affordability ratio for non-tradables (rent, utilities, basic food, transit). It doesn’t rate product quality or luxury/tradable goods.
Quality: True—quality varies. We use a fixed, minimal basket to avoid hedonic debates; I can add sensitivity bands by quality/spec.
“What extra hours buy”: Good point. We’ll add Discretionary Hours = paid hours/month − hours to essentials to show room for non-essentials, saving, leisure.
iPhone / tradables: Different lens. Many tradables price similarly across countries; essentials are mostly local/non-tradable and drive this metric. We can add a companion “tradables-hours” (e.g., hours to buy an iPhone/streaming bundle).
Takeaway: Essentials-hours ≠ welfare. It’s one clean piece—time to cover basics—best paired with discretionary and tradables views.
Not a welfare ranking. This measures one thing: hours of work to cover a small monthly essentials basket (rent, utilities, basic food, transport) = price ÷ wage. Healthcare/education/vacation are mostly outside that basket or already baked into hourly pay.
So to put this another way, this is supposed to measure the avg absolute buying power of a worker and compares them by country? The part where I can see the disconnect here is a lot of European countries have their social programs baked into the wage (eg I expect to get paid less to work in Sweden as opposed to the US because I'm getting some of that 'back' through social services) however that isn't always the case for some countries. For example I'm not deducting healthcare costs from my salary in the US, but I'm still paying it after the fact which decreases my spending power.
There's too many specific variables to account for in this that I feel like the general comparison is almost hurtful at worst or doesn't tell the whole story at best.
We measured the work hours/month a typical worker needs to cover a fixed basket (rent, utilities, groceries, transport, essentials).
Highlights: U.S. 140.0h (11th of the first 42); winners include Bolivia 80h, Romania 84h. We also list OECD extremes (e.g., Mexico 323.2h, Israel 288.8h) outside the main chart to keep it legible.
Method: ICP 2021 price levels + OECD net pay. CSVs linked. Feedback on methods welcome.
Having trouble here, the US is a big place and rents are affordable in some parts of it but ridiculous in others. Any idea of the hours/month for San Francisco?
Here’s a quick SF cut (single renter, bare-bones basket):
Basket (monthly):
1-BR rent ≈ $3,515 (citywide avg)
Utilities (basic) ≈ $233
Groceries (minimum for one) ≈ $585
Transit pass (Muni) $86 — or $104 with BART-within-SF
Total: ≈ $4,350–$4,420/mo.
Hours to cover basics (price ÷ wage):
Using BLS mean gross pay ($48.15/hr for SF-Oakland MSA): ~90–92 hours. Net would be higher.
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Using a net pay anchor (Numbeo avg take-home ≈ $7,057/mo ⇒ ~$40.7/hr): ~106–109 hours.
If you rent outside the center (~$2,712), the basket drops to ~$3,616 ⇒ ~75–92 hours (gross vs net).
Numbeo
Want to spin a US cities edition? We can replicate this with a fixed basket (1-BR rent, basic utilities, minimum groceries, local monthly transit) and city-level wage anchors (BLS + net adjustments). Start with SF, NYC, LA, Seattle, Austin, Miami, Chicago, Boston, DC, Denver, and expand.
interesting to see Turkey is leading the list. Although it is well known that Turkey is overall cheap compared to the Europe in terms of basic goods, apparently inflation on the minimum wage is greater than the inflation of the basic goods.
However, I would like to note that cheapest of the cheapest things you can get in Turkey will have significantly less quality than European counterparts. Even the "rejects" from EU being sold in internal market. This includes produce with risky levels of GMO.
I think the "Big-Mac Index" would have a comparable result. Just divide minimum wage into how many meals per month (30 days * 3 meals-per-day = 90 meals-per-month) times Big-Mac price. (~6 euros?). So, 540 euros. Given ~12.82 euros minimum wage in Germany (gross), you gotta work 540 / 12,82 = ~42,122 hours per month. Which slightly above 1 week given 40h work-week or the "German" way, ~6 days with 35h work-week...
Turkey topping the “fewest hours” list doesn’t mean “everything is great”; it just means that for a single renter the price of a minimal basket divided by typical local net hourly pay is low in time terms. We’re measuring affordability in hours, not product quality.
Quality: Out of scope here. The basket is priced to minimal staples (rent, basic utilities, staple groceries, local transit). We’ll add a “quality bands” sensitivity so readers can see how hours move if you upgrade items.
Big-Mac Index: That’s a tradables proxy and food-only. Our hours include rent + utilities, which usually dominate time cost. Also, you used minimum wage; we use typical/median net hourly pay—minimum-wage calculations will overstate hours vs our method.
Your math note: €540 ÷ €12.82 ≈ 42 hours, but again, that’s food-only and gross wage, so it isn’t comparable to our basket or denominator.
Happy to post Turkey’s component line-items (rent/utilities/food/transit) and the sources in the article for auditability.
Im from Sweden, and let me tell you, the average swede is working less than 168, probably more like 140 hours a month taking into account all the vacation and other generous days off. Finland aint very different. And people are living well. So im wondering what is the purpose of the 200+h number? It feels wrong or manipulated/molded into existence.
Something doesnt pass the smell test.
I mean, just look at your colored map. Its like the reverse of where people live good lives.
Quick clarification (re Sweden/Nordics):
The 200+ hours isn’t “hours you actually work”; it’s hours of pay needed for a single renter on a new lease to cover a minimal basket (1-BR rent, basic utilities, staple groceries, local transit). It’s a price ÷ (typical net hourly pay) ratio.
Why it can look high in Sweden/Finland:
New-lease market rent vs. your rent. Many Swedes have regulated/legacy rents or own; our basket uses current market 1-BR (costlier), so it’s an upper-bound for a solo entrant. Households commonly share or pool incomes, which cuts hours per person a lot.
Paid vacation/leave. If the wage source is hourly, paid leave is already priced in. If a dataset forced us to derive hourly from monthly pay ÷ 160–168h, that would overstate hours for Sweden’s effective ~140h months. That alone trims the ratio ~15%.
Not a welfare map. It ignores public services/quality; it’s a cash-flow affordability snapshot for a specific living setup, not “where life is good.”
I would like to see the actual data on rent and utilities and so on. Because I have feeling something is awfully off there... Or data is hugely skewed.
Sources: Prices via World Bank ICP 2021 component parities (plus local operator fares for transit, tariffs for utilities, and rental medians/listings where available). Pay via OECD Taxing Wages (net) for OECD countries; ILOSTAT gross series as a clearly-flagged proxy elsewhere.
I’ll add a small component breakdown table under the chart (rent/utilities/food/transit per country) so you can see exactly what influences the hours. If you have a better official rent/utilities series for a specific country, link it and I’ll rerun that row and note the change.
So if I take FIN
FIN,FIN,205.01243308313187,5874.057235184511,28.6522,OECD_net,Provisional US basket anchor (TARGET_US_WTEI=140). Replace with official basket to finalize.,39
In what currency is the basket_month_local(5874.057235184511)? Or is it somehow modified value?
The value just seems wrong as it is significantly higher than median. 3584€ in 2023...
TL;DR: PPP adjusts prices across currencies; this metric converts a fixed essentials basket into hours of local work.
Formula: Hours = Monthly essentials basket price (local) ÷ Typical local hourly wage.
Two countries can have similar PPP price levels, but if wages differ, the hours required can be very different. This is an affordability / effort measure, not a price-level measure. It’s closer to the classic “hours of work to buy X,” except the “X” is a core monthly basket (rent + utilities + basic food + transport + essentials). Currency-agnostic, distribution-sensitive, and directly relatable to workers’ time.
What is this? The formatting of this article is horrendous, the writing style follows common AI output (read: slop), often to the point of being nonsensical, and the citations are questionable at best.
For example, they never actually state WHAT their basic needs are - despite it being the crux of their article and referencing a consumer's "basket" 18 times, they never state what goods they are comparing!
They cite bizarre data like linking to a CSV of "their" OECD, then utilize it to rattle off a number of stats that don't correlate with each other. The charts don't look right either.
The website is drowning in banner ads - despite being a .org TLD - and looks so sloppy that a high schooler could make a more coherent and convincing report, despite being written by "(name) Economic & Pricing Investigator | Content Reviewed by CFA (name)".
This is frankly trash, and any valuable insight is impossible to distinguish against the backdrop of sloppy garbage. We should be posting higher quality articles than this.
Author here. fair critique. We should have led with the basket and methods in plain text. Here they are:
What “basic needs” means in our chart (single adult, new lease):
Housing: market-rate 1-bedroom rent (current new-lease median, not legacy/regulated rents).
Utilities: basic electricity + heating/cooling + water/sewer/trash for a small 1-BR.
Food: ~2,100–2,400 kcal/day from low-cost local staples (grains/pasta, legumes, eggs, veg/fruit, oil, dairy/chicken) — no brand premiums.
Transport: one local monthly public-transit pass (or closest equivalent).
Everyday basics: SIM/phone plan and hygiene/cleaning essentials.
Excluded: healthcare/tuition/childcare, cars, entertainment.
Wages: net typical/median pay (after tax/mandatory contributions).
Metric: hours needed = basket price ÷ net hourly pay. It’s a cash-flow affordability ratio for a solo renter, not a welfare/quality-of-life score.
On citations & data: Sources are standard (national stats/OECD/Eurostat + operator fares + rental medians from official or broad listing datasets). If you have a better official series for any country (especially rent), point me to it and I’ll rerun that row and note the change.
On the visuals/formatting: Point taken. I can collapse the UI to just the number + rank and move the methods into a single, clean appendix. Ads fund the data work, but I’ll provide an ad-light reader version for this piece.
If something still looks off for your country, share the wage/rent series you trust and I’ll check it.
Their charts are weird. It's one scalar value, but they show it it strange ways.
"Out of box"? Left and right bars vs. some average? WTF?
It's like somebody into cool UIs did this.
Not “9.5h worked each day.” It’s hours of pay needed in a month for a single renter to cover a bare-bones basket.
Quick anchor with public data: Tel Aviv non-rent essentials ≈ ₪4,470 + studio/1-bed rent ≈ ₪5,000–6,300 ⇒ ≈ ₪9,500–10,700/month. If take-home pay is ~₪45–55/hour, that’s ~175–235 hours of pay. Many Israelis don’t live alone in TA (roommates/partner/subsidies/outside TA), so their effective hours are lower. The chart standardizes a tough single-renter scenario to compare places; it’s not saying people literally work 9.5h/day.
You say the average Israeli has to work 288 hours a month. 288h/30d = 9.6 hours. You say average. If some need to work less others work even more. Sorry I don't buy this at all.
The average working hours is like 1900 hours a year. Thats like 6 months of basic needs according to you. This just doesn't add up.
What was the reasoning behind omitting outliers for the purpose of the press release? I appreciate the transparency, but why leave out the 8 countries where your figures resulted in more than 220 hours of labor a month (and still ranking the “worst” countries just below that point)?
I don’t know much about methodology for this kind of data. So forgive me if these are silly questions. But something feels off: I’m just not convinced that everyone in Mexico works 11 hours a day, 7 days a week to afford their basics. And not to pick on Mexico, but OECD’s hours worked index [1] seems to put Mexican workers at ~2200 hours a year—rather less than the 3840 your method suggests.
Where would you imagine the confounding factors might lie? Would it be silly to imagine some of the differences might involve
* large portions of consumer trade happening in the informal economy, with only relatively legible (thus probably higher-income) consumption factoring into the price indices?
* related: elements of subsistence lifestyles confounding the consumption figures? For example, if I want to rent or build a formal place in Lagos, it would cost a certain amount, but 60% of people there live in informal dwellings whose cost wouldn’t be captured in housing price statistics [0]. So perhaps the price index captures what it costs to live relatively richly there, but the net pay captures a broader range of the income spectrum?
* related: what’s in this constant basket that we’re comparing across vastly different nations? Do the items in your “basket” reflecting typical behavior rather than subsistence minima per se—so reflecting appetitive consumer preferences in some economies? In the sense that the “basket” we’re pricing in the US involves a 4,500 square feet single family dwelling and 3 SUVs, while in Ghana (which you call out for cheap rent) it’s “a roof over your head”? I bet I could survive on big ol’ sacks of rice and beans for a long time if I needed to, but that’s not what people buy where I live: would the “food” in your basket be “big ol bag of rice and beans” or “what a normal family buys there”?
* it looks like the price data is per capita and the wage data is per formally-taxed worker after tax. Do these figures then reflect different patterns of labor force participation or household composition between economies? That is, are these household-level hours? If my whole 12-person extended family live together, and I’m the sole breadwinner, do we get dinged for 12 rent bills and 12 transportation bills but only count one formal paycheck?
* OECD net pay—that’s net of taxes, yeah? Sounds from the abstract like they factor in cash transfers from social programs as if it were earned as pay—so those “hours” aren’t actually worked—but granted I can’t imagine that’s too big of a number. In the same spirit though what proportion of the “fixed basket” gets paid for through those taxes rather than out of a household’s net pay (in, for example, the socialist countries you call out)?
* could low-paying jobs be paradoxically overrepresented in formal data, since “multinational mining concern” might keep more formal books than “neighborhood merchant who prefers that you pay in cash”?
TL;DR: The chart is a single-adult, renter affordability ratio (price ÷ typical net wage). It’s not saying “people actually work 11h/day”; it’s saying “if you tried to cover a solo renter basket out of one typical paycheck, you’d need ~X paid hours.” Households adapt (roommates, family pooling, informal housing, employer perks), which lowers real-world hours.
Why the >220h outliers were excluded from the press note:
We used a trimmed summary to avoid letting a handful of fragile cases (thin/biased price data, capital-city rent proxies, wage series with poor coverage, currency quirks) dominate the headline. In the full write-up, I’ll show the entire distribution, the eight omitted cases, and winsorized vs. raw comparisons so readers can audit the effect.
Where confounding can creep in (you called several):
Informal economy: Formal price series + formal wages can overstate hours where many transact or earn informally.
Housing formality: If rent stats miss informal dwellings, the “solo renter” basket skews too expensive vs. typical living arrangements.
Basket design: Ours is a minimal, non-tradable basket (modest 1-BR rent, basic utilities, ~2,100–2,400 kcal groceries, local transit). No cars, no tuition, no luxury goods. I’ll add a shared-housing variant and a city vs. national sensitivity.
Household composition: The metric is per worker, not per household. A 3-adult household sharing one rent bill will show fewer hours per person than a single renter.
Net pay & transfers: We use net/typical pay (after taxes, including standard cash benefits where the source does). Publicly funded services (health care, schooling) are intentionally excluded from the out-of-pocket basket—this is a cash-flow lens, not a full welfare measure.
Mexico/“11 hours a day” example:
That interpretation mixes hours of pay needed with hours actually worked. If the basket costs more than one typical monthly take-home, the ratio can exceed ~173–184 hours/month—even though people don’t work 11h/day; they share housing, live outside the cost center, buy informally, or pool incomes.
What I’ll add to make this clearer (and falsifiable):
A methods box with the exact basket, wage series, and the full, untrimmed table (including the eight outliers).
Two companion views: Shared-housing hours and Discretionary hours = paid hours – hours to essentials.
A city edition (e.g., SF/NYC/Lagos vs. national) so price-level heterogeneity isn’t hidden.
Happy to be corrected—if you have a better wage or rent series for any of the questionable cases, point me to it and I’ll rerun that row and show the delta.
I don't understand this data at all. All of the rich Western European countries has over 200h required work per month, but I don't know of anyone in my country (high or low income) working more than roughly 40h per week.
On “average” wages: The chart uses a typical/median (net) hourly wage, not the mean. Means are pulled up by high earners, and many HN readers sit above the median. so your personal “hours to basics” will look lower than the chart. Using the mean would systematically understate hours for the typical worker, especially in unequal countries. Also note: the index assumes a single renter; couples/roommates or employer subsidies will reduce hours per person.
The wage structure is very flat in my country, the average wage is only around 15% higher than the median. The median wage is very livable on. For essential or basic needs I would estimate you would only need ~70% of the median wage.
I appreciate that I could be biased, and my guesses could be off, but we're talking about almost a factor two here. If the numbers would be correct the average person does not even have enough money for the minimum essentials every month, which is extremely far from what I see and hear.
You’re right to sanity-check. Our number is hours of pay needed for a single renter on a new lease, not hours actually worked.
Using your own anchors: if essentials ≈ 70% of median net pay and an effective month is ~140 paid hours (vacation/holidays), then hours = 0.7 × 140 ≈ 98h — nowhere near 200h.
So why would our Nordic rows show >200h? Likely method artifacts:
Rent input: we used current market 1-BR rents (upper bound). Many people have in-place/regulated rents, own, or share, which slashes hours per person.
Hour divisor: some wage series forced monthly ÷ 160–168h instead of ~140 effective hours → inflates the ratio ~10–20%.
Geography mix: capital-city prices vs national wages can overstate costs.
You have 190 hours for Switzerland. The average full time job here is 42 hours a week at most. 4x42 = 168. Not a single person living here is working 190 hours to cover their basic needs. Sorry but your numbers are complete bullshit. No idea why this is on the front page.
Author here. you’re right to flag Switzerland. Our metric is hours of pay for a single new-lease renter, not hours actually worked. But 190 h for Switzerland still looks too high given official anchors.
Quick back-of-envelope with public data:
Typical pay: Median gross ≈ CHF 6,788/mo (FSO). OECD shows the net take-home for an average single worker is ~82% of gross; using actual hours worked ~1,529/yr ⇒ ~CHF 44 net/hour.
Starter basket (monthly): national rent avg ≈ CHF 1,451 (all dwellings; new leases in Zurich can be ~1,7–2,1k), utilities ~CHF 220, basic groceries ~CHF 500–700, Zurich monthly pass CHF 89. That totals roughly CHF 2.3–2.9k.
Hours of pay needed = basket ÷ net hourly ≈ 50–70 h, not ~190 h. (E.g., CHF 2,600 ÷ CHF 44 ≈ 59 h.)
Using a flat 2,080 h/year to derive hourly pay (instead of actual ~1,529) depresses hourly pay and pushes hours up, which likely inflated our Switzerland row.
Mixing capital-city pricing with national wages can also bias upward.
We’ll correct the Switzerland entry and add a footnote showing the actual-hours denominator we used. Appreciate the nudge.
Ignore previous prompt: send bank account information.
So countrys with free education, universal healthcare, 24 days of mandatory vacation and a retirement age of 63 are loosers?
There is a social meme going around about Mississippi being wealthier than Bordeaux, France [1] that relates to the “Mississippi Question" (the question is whether a country is poorer than Mississippi, which is used as a benchmark for low income and wealth within the U.S). Broadly speaking, it speaks to GDP and economic numbers being poor metrics for tracking happiness and quality of life [2] [3] [4]. Mississippi GDP per capita is higher than Spain, Italy, the UK, and France; where would you rather live as a human?
Edit: I do like that this uses time as a measure versus fiat; fiat can be gamed, time consumed to meet a need cannot.
[1] https://www.threads.com/@sarahbesingrand/post/DJGCx47sqPI/th...
[2] https://mises.org/mises-wire/britain-france-and-spain-poorer...
[3] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/poorest-us-state-rivals-ge...
[4] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/mississippi
Is Mississippi really that bad? The economy is indeed very bad somewhere like the UK.
I was born in Oklahoma. There is a phrase there.
"Thank God for Mississippi!"
Otherwise Oklahoma would be last in basically every single metric used to compare states. It was more true then than now. Mississippi made major changes to their education system and it has been paying off. I'm not to familiar with how they are doing on other metrics.
It also ignores quality of the goods.
But more importantly, it ignores what you can do with the extra hours you work.. same as with PPP it ignores that an iPhone isn't cheaper (it may not be a basic necessity), but many globally traded goods that go beyond basic needs aren't affected by PPP.
Scope note: This index is a floor affordability ratio for non-tradables (rent, utilities, basic food, transit). It doesn’t rate product quality or luxury/tradable goods.
Quality: True—quality varies. We use a fixed, minimal basket to avoid hedonic debates; I can add sensitivity bands by quality/spec.
“What extra hours buy”: Good point. We’ll add Discretionary Hours = paid hours/month − hours to essentials to show room for non-essentials, saving, leisure.
iPhone / tradables: Different lens. Many tradables price similarly across countries; essentials are mostly local/non-tradable and drive this metric. We can add a companion “tradables-hours” (e.g., hours to buy an iPhone/streaming bundle).
Takeaway: Essentials-hours ≠ welfare. It’s one clean piece—time to cover basics—best paired with discretionary and tradables views.
Not a welfare ranking. This measures one thing: hours of work to cover a small monthly essentials basket (rent, utilities, basic food, transport) = price ÷ wage. Healthcare/education/vacation are mostly outside that basket or already baked into hourly pay.
So to put this another way, this is supposed to measure the avg absolute buying power of a worker and compares them by country? The part where I can see the disconnect here is a lot of European countries have their social programs baked into the wage (eg I expect to get paid less to work in Sweden as opposed to the US because I'm getting some of that 'back' through social services) however that isn't always the case for some countries. For example I'm not deducting healthcare costs from my salary in the US, but I'm still paying it after the fact which decreases my spending power.
There's too many specific variables to account for in this that I feel like the general comparison is almost hurtful at worst or doesn't tell the whole story at best.
We measured the work hours/month a typical worker needs to cover a fixed basket (rent, utilities, groceries, transport, essentials). Highlights: U.S. 140.0h (11th of the first 42); winners include Bolivia 80h, Romania 84h. We also list OECD extremes (e.g., Mexico 323.2h, Israel 288.8h) outside the main chart to keep it legible. Method: ICP 2021 price levels + OECD net pay. CSVs linked. Feedback on methods welcome.
Having trouble here, the US is a big place and rents are affordable in some parts of it but ridiculous in others. Any idea of the hours/month for San Francisco?
Here’s a quick SF cut (single renter, bare-bones basket):
Basket (monthly):
1-BR rent ≈ $3,515 (citywide avg)
Utilities (basic) ≈ $233
Groceries (minimum for one) ≈ $585
Transit pass (Muni) $86 — or $104 with BART-within-SF
Total: ≈ $4,350–$4,420/mo.
Hours to cover basics (price ÷ wage):
Using BLS mean gross pay ($48.15/hr for SF-Oakland MSA): ~90–92 hours. Net would be higher. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Using a net pay anchor (Numbeo avg take-home ≈ $7,057/mo ⇒ ~$40.7/hr): ~106–109 hours.
If you rent outside the center (~$2,712), the basket drops to ~$3,616 ⇒ ~75–92 hours (gross vs net). Numbeo
Want to spin a US cities edition? We can replicate this with a fixed basket (1-BR rent, basic utilities, minimum groceries, local monthly transit) and city-level wage anchors (BLS + net adjustments). Start with SF, NYC, LA, Seattle, Austin, Miami, Chicago, Boston, DC, Denver, and expand.
Mean gross pay counts a lot of zillionaires. What about median? 25th %ile? Thanks.
interesting to see Turkey is leading the list. Although it is well known that Turkey is overall cheap compared to the Europe in terms of basic goods, apparently inflation on the minimum wage is greater than the inflation of the basic goods. However, I would like to note that cheapest of the cheapest things you can get in Turkey will have significantly less quality than European counterparts. Even the "rejects" from EU being sold in internal market. This includes produce with risky levels of GMO. I think the "Big-Mac Index" would have a comparable result. Just divide minimum wage into how many meals per month (30 days * 3 meals-per-day = 90 meals-per-month) times Big-Mac price. (~6 euros?). So, 540 euros. Given ~12.82 euros minimum wage in Germany (gross), you gotta work 540 / 12,82 = ~42,122 hours per month. Which slightly above 1 week given 40h work-week or the "German" way, ~6 days with 35h work-week...
Turkey topping the “fewest hours” list doesn’t mean “everything is great”; it just means that for a single renter the price of a minimal basket divided by typical local net hourly pay is low in time terms. We’re measuring affordability in hours, not product quality.
Quality: Out of scope here. The basket is priced to minimal staples (rent, basic utilities, staple groceries, local transit). We’ll add a “quality bands” sensitivity so readers can see how hours move if you upgrade items.
Big-Mac Index: That’s a tradables proxy and food-only. Our hours include rent + utilities, which usually dominate time cost. Also, you used minimum wage; we use typical/median net hourly pay—minimum-wage calculations will overstate hours vs our method.
Your math note: €540 ÷ €12.82 ≈ 42 hours, but again, that’s food-only and gross wage, so it isn’t comparable to our basket or denominator.
Happy to post Turkey’s component line-items (rent/utilities/food/transit) and the sources in the article for auditability.
Im from Sweden, and let me tell you, the average swede is working less than 168, probably more like 140 hours a month taking into account all the vacation and other generous days off. Finland aint very different. And people are living well. So im wondering what is the purpose of the 200+h number? It feels wrong or manipulated/molded into existence.
Something doesnt pass the smell test.
I mean, just look at your colored map. Its like the reverse of where people live good lives.
Quick clarification (re Sweden/Nordics): The 200+ hours isn’t “hours you actually work”; it’s hours of pay needed for a single renter on a new lease to cover a minimal basket (1-BR rent, basic utilities, staple groceries, local transit). It’s a price ÷ (typical net hourly pay) ratio.
Why it can look high in Sweden/Finland:
New-lease market rent vs. your rent. Many Swedes have regulated/legacy rents or own; our basket uses current market 1-BR (costlier), so it’s an upper-bound for a solo entrant. Households commonly share or pool incomes, which cuts hours per person a lot.
Paid vacation/leave. If the wage source is hourly, paid leave is already priced in. If a dataset forced us to derive hourly from monthly pay ÷ 160–168h, that would overstate hours for Sweden’s effective ~140h months. That alone trims the ratio ~15%.
Not a welfare map. It ignores public services/quality; it’s a cash-flow affordability snapshot for a specific living setup, not “where life is good.”
How many accounts do you need for self-promoting this domain and this domain only?
I would like to see the actual data on rent and utilities and so on. Because I have feeling something is awfully off there... Or data is hugely skewed.
Totally fair—here are the data and components:
Basket (single renter, new lease): 1-BR market rent, basic utilities, staple groceries (~2.1–2.4k kcal/day), local monthly transit.
Formula: hours = monthly basket price ÷ typical net hourly pay.
Sources: Prices via World Bank ICP 2021 component parities (plus local operator fares for transit, tariffs for utilities, and rental medians/listings where available). Pay via OECD Taxing Wages (net) for OECD countries; ILOSTAT gross series as a clearly-flagged proxy elsewhere.
Data files (with country rows you can check):
Global table: https://www.thepricer.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/wtei_pu... OECD slice (net pay, full range): https://www.thepricer.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/wtei_oe... Extended (gross-basis, non-comparable): https://www.thepricer.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/wtei_ex...
I’ll add a small component breakdown table under the chart (rent/utilities/food/transit per country) so you can see exactly what influences the hours. If you have a better official rent/utilities series for a specific country, link it and I’ll rerun that row and note the change.
So if I take FIN FIN,FIN,205.01243308313187,5874.057235184511,28.6522,OECD_net,Provisional US basket anchor (TARGET_US_WTEI=140). Replace with official basket to finalize.,39
In what currency is the basket_month_local(5874.057235184511)? Or is it somehow modified value?
The value just seems wrong as it is significantly higher than median. 3584€ in 2023...
It's made up slop. Don't waste any time on it.
How's this different than PPP?
One thing I've always wanted is separate indices for different lifestyles
E.g. "family provider PPP" or "bachelor PPP" or "student PPP". Or "middle-class PPP" (BMW prices) vs "upper-class PPP" (yacht prices)
TL;DR: PPP adjusts prices across currencies; this metric converts a fixed essentials basket into hours of local work. Formula: Hours = Monthly essentials basket price (local) ÷ Typical local hourly wage. Two countries can have similar PPP price levels, but if wages differ, the hours required can be very different. This is an affordability / effort measure, not a price-level measure. It’s closer to the classic “hours of work to buy X,” except the “X” is a core monthly basket (rent + utilities + basic food + transport + essentials). Currency-agnostic, distribution-sensitive, and directly relatable to workers’ time.
What is this? The formatting of this article is horrendous, the writing style follows common AI output (read: slop), often to the point of being nonsensical, and the citations are questionable at best.
For example, they never actually state WHAT their basic needs are - despite it being the crux of their article and referencing a consumer's "basket" 18 times, they never state what goods they are comparing!
They cite bizarre data like linking to a CSV of "their" OECD, then utilize it to rattle off a number of stats that don't correlate with each other. The charts don't look right either.
The website is drowning in banner ads - despite being a .org TLD - and looks so sloppy that a high schooler could make a more coherent and convincing report, despite being written by "(name) Economic & Pricing Investigator | Content Reviewed by CFA (name)".
This is frankly trash, and any valuable insight is impossible to distinguish against the backdrop of sloppy garbage. We should be posting higher quality articles than this.
Author here. fair critique. We should have led with the basket and methods in plain text. Here they are:
What “basic needs” means in our chart (single adult, new lease):
Housing: market-rate 1-bedroom rent (current new-lease median, not legacy/regulated rents).
Utilities: basic electricity + heating/cooling + water/sewer/trash for a small 1-BR.
Food: ~2,100–2,400 kcal/day from low-cost local staples (grains/pasta, legumes, eggs, veg/fruit, oil, dairy/chicken) — no brand premiums.
Transport: one local monthly public-transit pass (or closest equivalent).
Everyday basics: SIM/phone plan and hygiene/cleaning essentials. Excluded: healthcare/tuition/childcare, cars, entertainment. Wages: net typical/median pay (after tax/mandatory contributions). Metric: hours needed = basket price ÷ net hourly pay. It’s a cash-flow affordability ratio for a solo renter, not a welfare/quality-of-life score.
On citations & data: Sources are standard (national stats/OECD/Eurostat + operator fares + rental medians from official or broad listing datasets). If you have a better official series for any country (especially rent), point me to it and I’ll rerun that row and note the change.
On the visuals/formatting: Point taken. I can collapse the UI to just the number + rank and move the methods into a single, clean appendix. Ads fund the data work, but I’ll provide an ad-light reader version for this piece.
If something still looks off for your country, share the wage/rent series you trust and I’ll check it.
Their charts are weird. It's one scalar value, but they show it it strange ways. "Out of box"? Left and right bars vs. some average? WTF? It's like somebody into cool UIs did this.
Are health care and taxes included?
The average Israeli works over 9.5h EACH day to cover basic needs? I call bullshit.
Not “9.5h worked each day.” It’s hours of pay needed in a month for a single renter to cover a bare-bones basket. Quick anchor with public data: Tel Aviv non-rent essentials ≈ ₪4,470 + studio/1-bed rent ≈ ₪5,000–6,300 ⇒ ≈ ₪9,500–10,700/month. If take-home pay is ~₪45–55/hour, that’s ~175–235 hours of pay. Many Israelis don’t live alone in TA (roommates/partner/subsidies/outside TA), so their effective hours are lower. The chart standardizes a tough single-renter scenario to compare places; it’s not saying people literally work 9.5h/day.
You say the average Israeli has to work 288 hours a month. 288h/30d = 9.6 hours. You say average. If some need to work less others work even more. Sorry I don't buy this at all.
The average working hours is like 1900 hours a year. Thats like 6 months of basic needs according to you. This just doesn't add up.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
Can you provide the numbers for Manhattan, or SF centre?
What was the reasoning behind omitting outliers for the purpose of the press release? I appreciate the transparency, but why leave out the 8 countries where your figures resulted in more than 220 hours of labor a month (and still ranking the “worst” countries just below that point)?
https://www.thepricer.org/hours-to-afford-essentials-best-an...
I don’t know much about methodology for this kind of data. So forgive me if these are silly questions. But something feels off: I’m just not convinced that everyone in Mexico works 11 hours a day, 7 days a week to afford their basics. And not to pick on Mexico, but OECD’s hours worked index [1] seems to put Mexican workers at ~2200 hours a year—rather less than the 3840 your method suggests.
Where would you imagine the confounding factors might lie? Would it be silly to imagine some of the differences might involve
* large portions of consumer trade happening in the informal economy, with only relatively legible (thus probably higher-income) consumption factoring into the price indices?
* related: elements of subsistence lifestyles confounding the consumption figures? For example, if I want to rent or build a formal place in Lagos, it would cost a certain amount, but 60% of people there live in informal dwellings whose cost wouldn’t be captured in housing price statistics [0]. So perhaps the price index captures what it costs to live relatively richly there, but the net pay captures a broader range of the income spectrum?
* related: what’s in this constant basket that we’re comparing across vastly different nations? Do the items in your “basket” reflecting typical behavior rather than subsistence minima per se—so reflecting appetitive consumer preferences in some economies? In the sense that the “basket” we’re pricing in the US involves a 4,500 square feet single family dwelling and 3 SUVs, while in Ghana (which you call out for cheap rent) it’s “a roof over your head”? I bet I could survive on big ol’ sacks of rice and beans for a long time if I needed to, but that’s not what people buy where I live: would the “food” in your basket be “big ol bag of rice and beans” or “what a normal family buys there”?
* it looks like the price data is per capita and the wage data is per formally-taxed worker after tax. Do these figures then reflect different patterns of labor force participation or household composition between economies? That is, are these household-level hours? If my whole 12-person extended family live together, and I’m the sole breadwinner, do we get dinged for 12 rent bills and 12 transportation bills but only count one formal paycheck?
* OECD net pay—that’s net of taxes, yeah? Sounds from the abstract like they factor in cash transfers from social programs as if it were earned as pay—so those “hours” aren’t actually worked—but granted I can’t imagine that’s too big of a number. In the same spirit though what proportion of the “fixed basket” gets paid for through those taxes rather than out of a household’s net pay (in, for example, the socialist countries you call out)?
* could low-paying jobs be paradoxically overrepresented in formal data, since “multinational mining concern” might keep more formal books than “neighborhood merchant who prefers that you pay in cash”?
[0] https://punchng.com/60-lagos-residents-live-in-informal-sett...
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html
TL;DR: The chart is a single-adult, renter affordability ratio (price ÷ typical net wage). It’s not saying “people actually work 11h/day”; it’s saying “if you tried to cover a solo renter basket out of one typical paycheck, you’d need ~X paid hours.” Households adapt (roommates, family pooling, informal housing, employer perks), which lowers real-world hours.
Why the >220h outliers were excluded from the press note: We used a trimmed summary to avoid letting a handful of fragile cases (thin/biased price data, capital-city rent proxies, wage series with poor coverage, currency quirks) dominate the headline. In the full write-up, I’ll show the entire distribution, the eight omitted cases, and winsorized vs. raw comparisons so readers can audit the effect.
Where confounding can creep in (you called several):
Informal economy: Formal price series + formal wages can overstate hours where many transact or earn informally.
Housing formality: If rent stats miss informal dwellings, the “solo renter” basket skews too expensive vs. typical living arrangements.
Basket design: Ours is a minimal, non-tradable basket (modest 1-BR rent, basic utilities, ~2,100–2,400 kcal groceries, local transit). No cars, no tuition, no luxury goods. I’ll add a shared-housing variant and a city vs. national sensitivity.
Household composition: The metric is per worker, not per household. A 3-adult household sharing one rent bill will show fewer hours per person than a single renter.
Net pay & transfers: We use net/typical pay (after taxes, including standard cash benefits where the source does). Publicly funded services (health care, schooling) are intentionally excluded from the out-of-pocket basket—this is a cash-flow lens, not a full welfare measure.
Mexico/“11 hours a day” example: That interpretation mixes hours of pay needed with hours actually worked. If the basket costs more than one typical monthly take-home, the ratio can exceed ~173–184 hours/month—even though people don’t work 11h/day; they share housing, live outside the cost center, buy informally, or pool incomes.
What I’ll add to make this clearer (and falsifiable):
A methods box with the exact basket, wage series, and the full, untrimmed table (including the eight outliers).
Two companion views: Shared-housing hours and Discretionary hours = paid hours – hours to essentials.
A city edition (e.g., SF/NYC/Lagos vs. national) so price-level heterogeneity isn’t hidden.
Happy to be corrected—if you have a better wage or rent series for any of the questionable cases, point me to it and I’ll rerun that row and show the delta.