Singapore's cost of living may not be the highest in the world: report

The city may not be the costliest after all, if tax-adjusted values are taken into account.

For the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU), Singapore has been holding the crown as the costliest city in the world for five years. However, if the study took into account the tax-adjusted values of costs, the city would only be in 11th place, Sovereign Group said.

EIU’s study said that Singapore's cost of living is 16% more expensive than the benchmark city of New York. However, for Sovereign Group, Copenhagen is once again the most expensive city in the world, if the tax-adjusted values of costs ($6,300) are taken into account.

Furthermore, the cost of living for Singapore’s top earners was down by 3.33% from $2,640 last year to $2,552. Despite the decline, Singapore edged up the rankings from 13th to 11th place.

Meanwhile, cost of living for Singapore’s average earners, which includes tax and social security contributions, dramatically jumped by 88% from $798 last year to $1,500.

Sovereign Group clarified that it did not take into account social security contributions when it computed the cost of living for top earners and said, “We have not taken account of social security contributions because these have only a marginal impact on top earners who pay the top rate of tax.”

Other high-ranking cities in Sovereign Group's index included France ($5,600), Israel ($5,150), and Australia ($4,590). Other Asian cities were Seoul ($4,028) at sixth place and Hong Kong ($1,887) at 14th place.

Reaching the people who run Asia's businesses is harder than it used to be.

Inboxes are crowded. Attention is short. The executives you most want to reach — the founders, CFOs, and operators who actually move budgets — are the hardest to find through the usual channels. If you're building a company, a category, or a reputation, you already know this.

We've spent twenty years building the room they read. Singapore Business Review is where senior decision makers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia come for business coverage they can't get elsewhere — in print, online, and in person at the summits and roundtables we host across seven markets.

If you have something these readers should know about — a point of view worth publishing, a product worth their attention, an event worth their time — we'd like to hear what you're trying to do.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia