expatistan.com APIexpatistan.com ↗
Access Expatistan's cost of living data for cities and countries worldwide. Compare prices, view rankings, and retrieve itemized expenses across 6 categories.
curl -X GET 'https://api.parse.bot/scraper/de9d469c-5a9e-40ae-ab39-abdd0b916473/get_city_cost_of_living?city_slug=london' \ -H 'X-API-Key: $PARSE_API_KEY'
Get detailed cost of living data for a specific city. Returns itemized prices across categories like Food, Housing, Clothes, Transportation, Personal Care, and Entertainment, along with monthly cost estimates.
| Param | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| city_slugrequired | string | The city slug identifier (e.g. 'london', 'new-york-city', 'paris'). Use search_city_autocomplete to find valid slugs. |
{
"type": "object",
"fields": {
"city": "string, city name with country as displayed on the page",
"slug": "string, the city slug used in the request",
"prices": "object with category keys (Food, Housing, Clothes, Transportation, Personal Care, Entertainment) each containing an array of price items",
"summary": "object containing family_of_four_monthly_cost, single_person_monthly_cost, and optionally ranking_info"
},
"sample": {
"data": {
"city": "Cost of living inLondon, United Kingdom",
"slug": "london",
"prices": {
"Food": [
{
"item": "Basic lunchtime menu (including a drink) in the business district",
"price": "£15"
}
],
"Housing": [
{
"item": "Monthly rent for 85 m2 (900 sqft) furnished accommodation in expensive area",
"price": "£3,019"
}
]
},
"summary": {
"single_person_monthly_cost": "£3,702 London is the most expensive city in Western Europe (1 out of 44) London is the 2nd most expensive city in the World (2 out of 106) What salary will you need in London ? Find out with your own Salary Calculation",
"family_of_four_monthly_cost": "£6,101 Single person estimated monthly costs: £3,702 London is the most expensive city in Western Europe (1 out of 44) London is the 2nd most expensive city in the World (2 out of 106) What salary will you need in London ? Find out with your own Salary Calculation"
}
},
"status": "success"
}
}About the expatistan.com API
The Expatistan API exposes cost of living data across 7 endpoints, covering itemized prices in 6 categories — Food, Housing, Clothes, Transportation, Personal Care, and Entertainment — for cities and countries worldwide. The compare_cities endpoint returns a side-by-side percentage breakdown between any two cities, while get_city_rankings lists cities by price index with optional regional filtering.
City and Country Cost Data
The get_city_cost_of_living and get_country_cost_of_living endpoints both accept a slug parameter — city_slug or country_slug respectively — and return prices organized under six category keys: Food, Housing, Clothes, Transportation, Personal Care, and Entertainment. Each category holds an array of individual price items. The summary object on both endpoints includes family_of_four_monthly_cost and single_person_monthly_cost, giving a quick aggregate without summing line items manually. Use search_city_autocomplete with a query string to resolve a city name to its valid handle (slug) before calling the detail endpoints.
City and Country Rankings
get_city_rankings returns a ranked array of cities with rank, city, slug, and price_index fields. It accepts an optional region parameter — valid values include world, europe, north-america, latin-america, asia, middle-east, and africa among others — letting you scope results to a specific part of the world. get_country_rankings takes no parameters and returns the same shape for countries, ordered from most to least expensive.
City Comparisons
compare_cities takes two slug parameters (city1_slug, city2_slug) and returns a summary string with the overall percentage difference, plus a comparison_details array. Each item in comparison_details includes the category, item name, the price in each city, and the percentage difference, making it straightforward to identify which expense categories drive the gap between two locations.
Recent Activity
get_recent_data requires no inputs and returns two arrays: recent_prices (strings describing newly submitted price entries) and recent_comparisons (objects with a text description and a URL). This endpoint reflects the crowd-sourced nature of Expatistan's dataset, where individual contributors submit local prices.
- Build a relocation calculator that uses
compare_citiesto show salary-adjusted cost differences between a user's current city and a target city. - Populate a country research dashboard with
get_country_cost_of_livingsummary fields for monthly living cost estimates. - Filter
get_city_rankingsby region to display the top 10 cheapest cities in Asia or Europe for a digital nomad guide. - Use
search_city_autocompleteto power a city search typeahead before fetching full cost breakdowns. - Generate housing and food cost comparisons for an HR tool that calculates cost-of-living adjustments for international transfers.
- Monitor
get_recent_datato surface newly submitted local prices and flag significant changes in specific categories. - Aggregate
get_country_rankingsdata to visualize global cost-of-living distribution on a choropleth map.
| Tier | Price | Credits/month | Rate limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | 100 | 5 req/min |
| Hobby | $30/mo | 1,000 | 20 req/min |
| Developer | $100/mo | 5,000 | 250 req/min |
One credit = one API call regardless of which marketplace API you call. Exceeding the rate limit returns a 429 response. Authenticate with the X-API-Key header.
Does Expatistan offer an official developer API?+
What does the `compare_cities` endpoint actually return beyond a summary sentence?+
comparison_details array where each element includes the expense category, the specific item name, the price in each city, and the percentage difference between them. This lets you pinpoint which individual items — such as rent or groceries — account for the most cost variation, rather than relying only on the top-level summary string.Does the API expose historical cost of living data or price trends over time?+
get_recent_data. You can fork this API on Parse and revise it to add an endpoint that tracks or caches price snapshots over time.How complete is city coverage, and does it include smaller cities?+
search_city_autocomplete endpoint will return results only for cities that exist in the Expatistan database. If a city you need is missing, you can fork the API on Parse and revise it to supplement with additional data sources.