Cost of living by city
Cost of living in Switzerland
1 city in Switzerland with data. Every figure has sources you can open.
| City | 1 person, per month | Family of 2 adults + 2 children, per month | Prices for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zurich | US$3,663 | US$5,876 | October 2026 |
Country profile · Cost of Living Index (0–100 scale) · All cities
How it is calculated
- Prices: each item is the average of samples read straight from the original source: supermarket web shops, official tariffs of electricity, water, gas, mobile and transport operators, rental listings and restaurant menus. No price-aggregator sites are used. Every item opens its list of sources. Rents are for apartments outside the city centre.
- Housing: 1 to 2 people rent a 1-bedroom apartment; 3 to 6 people rent a 3-bedroom apartment. The calculator accepts households of up to 6 people because the largest apartment in the data has 3 bedrooms.
- Electricity, water, gas: linear interpolation by household size between the 1-person level (electricity 200 kWh, water 4 m³, gas 100 kWh) and the 4-person level (electricity 450 kWh, water 15 m³, gas 225 kWh); above 4 people the same slope is extended. Gas is left out where most apartments cook on electricity.
- Groceries: a fixed basket of 15 everyday items at online retail prices, one basket per adult and 0.6 of a basket per child. It is not a household’s full food spending.
- Eating out: per adult, 8 meals at an inexpensive restaurant and 2 at a mid-range restaurant a month; children are not counted.
- Internet and mobile: one internet plan per household and one mobile plan per adult.
- Transport: one adult monthly pass per adult and one child monthly pass per child.
- International school fees and other reference items are shown for information and are not added to the total.
- Where an item lacks enough data, that part and the total read “Not enough data”. Prosperous Intelligence does not estimate in its place.
- Conversion to US dollars uses central-bank exchange rates fixed to one day for the whole batch; the rate date and the dates prices were read are on the Data sources page.
