Cost of living in Kuala Lumpur

How it is calculated

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Eating out: per adult, 8 meals at an inexpensive restaurant and 2 at a mid-range restaurant a month; children are not counted.
6. Internet and mobile: one internet plan per household and one mobile plan per adult.
7. Transport: one adult monthly pass per adult and one child monthly pass per child.
8. International school fees and other reference items are shown for information and are not added to the total.
9. Where an item lacks enough data, that part and the total read “Not enough data”. Prosperous Intelligence does not estimate in its place.
10. 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.

Methodology · Data sources