What does Mexico cost?
The honest answer is: where you land matters more than the country. City-level grades, in order of dollar arbitrage — with the country aggregate as context, not headline.
Where buyers go
The five Mexico markets North-American buyers shop most, each paired with a US comparable city so the monthly figure means something.
Still the strongest dollar arbitrage of the five. Rent is the lowest here, and the consistent instrument keeps it ahead of the rest.
Highland colonial with a US-retiree concentration; rent pulled up by short-term-rental supply. Thin Numbeo sample — read the low-confidence caveat.
Best-sampled of the four. Range across neighbourhoods is enormous — pick by the city, not by the country score.
Pacific coast established. The priciest of the four on the consistent instrument — coastal A/C drives utilities up.
On the consistent Numbeo 1BR instrument Tulum is $777 — cheap, not the luxury-furnished outlier the old read implied. Ships with stacked, clearly-disclosed caveats: Food uses the Mexico national figure, there is no transit figure, and the data is the oldest of the four.
5 of 5 cities earn a C or higher — Tulum at $1,359/mo; Puerto Vallarta blows the country average at $2,177/mo.
A strong dollar story on a documented basis: the comfortable tier is 43% of a comparable US city, with rent carrying most of the gap. Healthcare here is the WHO out-of-pocket figure — what households spend out of pocket per person, not an insurance premium — which is why the headline is lower than premium-based estimates. The arbitrage is real but uneven across the country: read the city pages, where the same instrument moves the number a lot.
Each bar = number of cities at that grade. Where you live in Mexico moves the comfortable monthly by 2× or more.
Mexico's $460/mo food figure is the disclosed anchor for the site-wide Food instrument: it pins the Numbeo Groceries Index (New York = 100) to a US-dollar scale, and every other market's Food figure is then its own Numbeo Groceries Index converted on that same scale — one consistent instrument across markets.
Average out-of-pocket health spending per person — WHO Global Health Expenditure Database, out-of-pocket expenditure per capita (current US$), indicator SH.XPD.OOPC.PC.CD: Mexico $313.80/yr (2023, latest available) ÷ 12 = $26.15/mo.
Electricity, gas, water, internet, monthly transit.
What the dollar arbitrage buys
The comfortable monthly figure for Mexico sits at $1,826 — 43% of a comparable US city. Housing is the dominant lever, and on the consistent Numbeo 1BR instrument the buyer cities run from roughly $777 (Tulum) to $1,446 (Puerto Vallarta) — the country figure honestly sits between them. Food and daily living are well below US benchmarks across every city. Healthcare here is the WHO out-of-pocket figure — what households spend out of pocket per person, not an insurance premium — which is why the headline is lower than premium-based estimates.
The country aggregate is not the experience on the ground. On the consistent instrument Mérida and Tulum are both deep discounts to a comparable US city — the old "Tulum eats the arbitrage" read was a luxury-furnished listing artefact, not what the uniform Numbeo 1BR shows. We report each city honestly and link to the city pages where the difference matters — the composite holds the spread instead of averaging it away.
Five markets with the closest composite scores.
Anchors held constant across every country page.
Cost by city
Each city draws on its own Inmuebles24 rent median, local Walmart / La Comer basket, and locally-sourced healthcare quotes. The data level is shown on each card.
One market read, one process explainer, one number to know.
Free, no sponsors. Cross-border property and retirement, written for North American buyers.