The skyline of Cebu City’s uptown area | CDN Digital Photo by Morexette Marie Erram
CEBU CITY, Philippines – Cebu City, one of the country’s largest metropolis, is the 60th most expensive city to live in Asia, findings from a crowdsourcing survey showed.
Numbeo, in its Mid-2022 Cost of Living Index, ranked Cebu City as the 60th most expensive city to live in Asia, next to Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, with a Cost of Living Index of 34.75.
The open database site reported that as of July 2022, a family of four residing here should spend at least P96,958.81 per month, excluding rent, in order to live.
A single person’s monthly costs in Cebu City, not including rent, also hit as high as P27,536.36.
“Cebu is 4.54% less expensive than Manila. Rent in Cebu is, on average, 37.22% lower than in Manila,” Numbeo added.
Three other key cities in the Philippines were also part of Numbeo’s Top 60 most expensive cities to live in Asia. These are the cities of Makati, Quezon and the capital Manila.
The open database site ranked Makati as the 38th most expensive city to live in Asia, with a Cost of Living Index of 45.34.
Quezon City and Manila are placed at the 43rd and 52nd posts respectively. The former got a Cost of Living Index of 40 while that of the latter stood at 36.66.
Lately, a study by UK-based OnlineMortgageAdvisor also showed that Cebu City is among the cities with the highest cost of rent in Asia. OnlineMortgageAdvisor sources its data from Numbeo.
Founded in 2009 by Serbian developers, Numbeo is considered “the world’s largest database of user-contributed data about cities and countries worldwide.”
The site said it “relies on user inputs and manually collected data from authoritative sources such as governments, newspapers, and other surveys.”
Experts, on the other hand, cautioned the public in taking Numbeo’s figures at face value.
They pointed out that these are not based on “official and confirmed statistics” and were generated through user-contributed surveys and insights, therefore vulnerable to “statistical misuse, misrepresentation, and inaccuracies.”
While there are no specific statistics that show Cebu City’s cost of living, the Philippine Statistics Authority in Central Visayas (PSA-7) observed that inflation in the city has hiked from 1.5 last May to 2.3 in June.
According to Investopedia, inflation measures the increase in the price of goods and services or the decrease in purchasing power. Cost-of-living, on the other hand, measures the change in the basic necessities of life such as housing, healthcare, and food, they added.
While the two terms are different, they are “closely related,” Investopedia stated.
Inflation can affect the cost-of-living in a certain area. In most cases, a rise in inflation also meant a higher cost-of-living.
“Cost of living is a far more difficult number to pin down, and it varies widely among different demographic groups as well as different regions,” Investopedia said.
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