🇨🇷 Cost of Living in Costa Rica
An estimated $1,566/month to live comfortably, and a real food-cost index of 95 (world average = 100) alongside a healthcare score of 84/100.
Est. monthly cost to live comfortably
$1,566
1.3x real avg. local earnings
Food-cost index
95
World average = 100 — VanBasket / World Bank ICP
Est. restaurant meal
$14.25
$15 world-average anchor x food-cost index
Healthcare (WHO)
84/100
Safety percentile: 10.1/100
We deliberately don't show housing, transport, utilities, or childcare costs here — no free, legal, per-country dataset for those exists that we could verify. Showing only what real data supports, and disclosing the gap, beats inventing a plausible-looking number.
Frequently asked questions
Is Costa Rica expensive to live in?
Its real food-cost index is 95 (world average = 100), meaning restaurant meals there run about $14.25 on our disclosed $15 world-average-meal basis. Healthcare coverage scores 84/100 (WHO), and our safety percentile is 10.1/100.
What is the cost of living in Costa Rica per month?
An estimated $1,566/month to live comfortably — 1.3x Costa Rica's real average local earnings, RouteWise's documented comfortable-living estimate. It's a real, disclosed-assumption figure, not an itemized rent-and-groceries budget.
What's included in this cost-of-living figure?
Exactly what real data supports: the food-cost index, the derived restaurant-meal price, an estimated comfortable monthly cost, plus real healthcare-coverage and safety-percentile data. We deliberately don't show housing, transport, or utilities estimates here — no verified free dataset publishes those by country, and we'd rather disclose the gap than invent a number.
Explore more about this country
Data: VanBasket / World Bank ICP food-cost index, WHO Universal Health Coverage Index, OWID/UNODC homicide-rate statistics.