Cost of Living Update in Buenos Aires Argentina
One of the most frequently asked questions I get as a long time expat living in Buenos Aires is how much does it cost to live there? Well like any other city you can make it much cheaper or much more expensive based on how you live and where you live.
Also, since many expats recently have been complaining about how inflation is eating into their budget and how Argentina is less of a deal than it once was, I thought I would dispel the rumors and put a stop to this nonsense of people saying that Argentina is expensive.
Argentina is CERTAINLY *NOT* EXPENSIVE. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Not compared to any major North American or European City, at all, in any way whatsoever. How do I know. I have recently traveled to the UK, France, Italy, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Oregon, Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Tokyo.
The only ones of these cities that are even close to the same category as Argentina are the cities in Thailand that I mentioned.
But here are the numbers for how a young couple could live in Buenos Aires.
Rent for a 2 bed/2 bath apartment, in the Palermo area (a top neighborhood), of reasonable to nice ambiance/amenities, about 70 square meters, will cost about 700 to 900 US dollars per month. More if you want bigger and nicer, less (WAY WAY LESS!!!!) if you go to another neighborhood and have modest accommodations. You can still easily get an apartment like this for 500 dollars per month in many parts of the city and in the interior in Mendoza or Rosario you can get apartments for 300 easily.
Food: here is where you win the most compared to the USA and Europe. Supermarket shopping, especially for meats and produce is super cheap. I estimate that all of our food costs are about 15 US dollars for TWO people per day (excluding dining out). That is 450 per month for TWO people!!
Transportation: another huge win! Argentina has the cheapest public transportation in the world without exception. It costs 25 cents US for a bus ride. Taxis are still cheap too at about 5 dollars for a 15 minute taxi ride.
Dining out: I have heard so many people complain about this… well yes prices have risen, but in 2004 through about 2008 they were just giving stuff away! It was silly and ridiculous the prices they were charging for things. I could pay 8 US dollars for a massive steak dinner with wine and dessert. Now I pay 20 to 25 and a *very nice* steak house with wine and dessert per person. Where can you get that in the USA or Europe? NOWHERE!!
Health insurance is a joke! It is soooo cheap here! Recently I didnt have health insurance and I started having severe headaches and so my Doctor in the USA told me I needed and MRI immediately to rule out the possibility of an aneurism. I was very afraid of how much that would cost. But anyway, I found a specialty lab and convinced them to let me pay out of pocket… how much did that cost? about 90 US dollars. In the USA out of pocket this would cost 1000.
And monthly insurance is the same: about 100 dollars per month for tremendous coverage that even goes so far as to *include* an aesthetic surgery *for free* every 2 years. Are you kidding me?
Suffice it to say, yes, Argentina has gotten more expensive from 2004, when I got here, but it is completely incorrect to say that it is expensive because it just isnt. It is still a great deal in many categories, especially the basic ones like rent, food, transportation and health care.
Now, what is a terrible deal here? Electronics, clothing, household appliances and furniture. All of that stuff is 2-3 times more expensive here than in the USA. Fortunately, these are the things you can make due with less of.
I think the problem is though that when you get paid in pesos, even paying 500 USD can be a steep part of someone’s salary. Add that with the fact that it’s easy to get ripped off and pay “the foreigner’s price” for housing (unless you already have argie connections and can get a garantia) means that it is even more of a burden on the paycheck. I made about 4000 ARG, lived in a shared apt in Colegiales, and cooked my own meals most nights (and if not had cheap empanada/pizza dinners), and it was still hard for me to save. Yes, Buenos Aires isn’t as expensive as people make it out to be, but on a peso salary, it’s not the easiest to get by.
Hey Jenn, Thanks for the comment! I’m glad you agree that its not as expensive as many of the expats here would have you believe. It’s not easy to get by anywhere these days! And what irks me personally is when I hear people say that its more expensive that the US or Europe which is so far from the truth its shocking. It will still cost you twice as much to live in any major US or European city.
This is all fine and good if you are living in Buenos Aires strictly on USD! What about the expats in it for the long haul who – gasp? – actually earn a salary in ARS? Not such a great deal then, at least in my experiences over the past 5 years.
Thanks for the comment Paige! I totally agree that it is more expensive than the *unbelievably dirt cheap* that it was in 2007. But it is still only half the price of major US or European cities by any measure and unfortunately, making dollars vs making pesos only effects you when the exchange rate changes. If you make a million pesos per month that is still more than making one thousand dollars. I think what you might be saying is that Argentine employers do not raise their salaries as much as US employers who have shipped expats overseas (to here) and still make dollars, a volume of dollars that is a US salary. But this is a separate issue. I am talking about actual cost of living compared to major US or European cities. On any measure for transportation, housing and food, Buenos Aires is way less than half the price. When measuring clothing or electronics, it is 2-3 times the price, but fortunately these items are not as integral to your daily life and represent a smaller percentage of spending, especially if you are on a budget. Your point speaks to wage increases relative to costs, which I agree are not going up so quickly here, but then again, they were not great in 2004 when I got here either, as locals (and anyone else employed locally) were still paid pitifully compared to actual costs of living.
When you talk about prices in dollars are you using the official or blue rate? It makes quite a difference to the actual amount you pay, unless one is handing over precious dollars! And long-term rental with garantia or short-term?
I disagree with you. You are obviously one of the spoiled American expats who earns dollars in a peso economy. For those of us who actually live on the local economy, making ends meet is increasingly difficult. It may be true that buses are cheap but they also spew out poisonous fumes that make you feel as though you’ve been gassed in World War I. No air conditioning, packed with people. You get what you pay for. Buying a car is far more expensive than in the US as is renting one. Furnishing an apartment is far more expensive. All appliances are infinitely more expensive. Cheap health insurance? Maybe if you’re in your 20′s or 30′s. I pay 1,700 pesos a month. My apartment of 70 meters has ‘expensas’ or a condo fee of 1,650 a month for which I get NOTHING except for lazy doormen. Quality products in the supermarket are hard to come by now that imports are severely limited and lots of agricultural items produced in Argentina are as expensive or more so than in the US. What is the price of coffee in a cafe? 14 pesos or more? It’s cheaper in Italy and cheaper in the US. You and I are apparently living in different Argentinas.
Hi Geoff, Thanks for the comment. I would encourage you to use a more respectful tone when commenting on my blog, because the whole idea is that we generate a dialogue and discourse. In addition, using personal insults is not the way to create rational discourse. To address the actual cost of living facts I list… they are easily verifiable. Especially with respect to health insurance have you looked at Accord Salud? My wife and I pay 450 pesos per month and that *includes* unlimited visits to the doctor, 90% of our prescriptions, and even a plastic surgery every two years, free of charge. Next, I would like to point out that the point of this blog is to draw attention to the fact that Buenos Aires, when all costs are looked at, is still far less (less tha 50%) of the cost of any major 1st world city. Compare to NY, LA, DC, Chicago, Tokyo, London, Paris and you will find that rent alone makes your cost of living 2-3x as much.
I fully agree that cars, clothes, electronics and appliances are far more expensive in Argentina than the USA. But these items are variable expenses and easily controlled. You cannot live without paying rent or buying food but you certainly can without an ipad.
Finally, I would like to ask you a question: if things are so bad like everyone else is saying, then why not leave? I don’t understand why all the expats out there who seem to hate Argentina so much, especially now that it costs a bit more than the dirt cheap prices of 2004-2008, don’t leave. We all agree, and I have acknowledged on my show (www.bacast.com), on this blog and to many many people that yes, Argentina does cost more than it did last year and especially 5 years ago. But that in no way makes it “expensive”, especially on a world scale. And again, if things are so bad for you here, that you have to lash out at the Argentines and insult everything they are and everything they do, then why would you stay?
Yeah, I always feel like things are so expensive and then when I travel and come back it doesn´t quite feel that way anymore. I mean, it´s still as expensive, but not as much as it is in other countries. That could be that our earnings are not keeping up with the cost of things and that is called living in inflation. You start to loose your bearings and you loose the ability to differentiate between what is expensive vs a deal because everything feels like its “expensive”.
I imagine that the grass on the other side starts looking even greener as well.
Thanks for the comment Frank! Yes this is exactly my point! If you go to the USA, Canada, AUS, UK, France, you will find that all costs are much much higher when compared dollar for dollar or euro for euro. There are some notable exceptions like electronics, but we all knew that when we signed up for living in Argentina, and all of the exception items fall outside the scope of what are essential items to live (rent, water, food, health care… maybe we should talk about cost of education in this discussion??)
Sorry if I offended you. I was trying to point out that living on the local economy is quite different from living on a dollar income that can be changed to pesos on the black market.
As to health insurance, after a certain age you can not easily – or at all – change insurers. I thought I had made that clear, hence I am stuck with high payments.
At no point did I say that I hated Argentina. The views I expressed are no different from those of my Argentine friends. I regret deeply the horrible government we have that has led to this crisis.
Why don’t I leave? First of all I have personal commitments that keep me here, second I can not sell property in the current economic climate.
I disagree with your assessment of the cost of living. You can cite all the surveys you want. Salaries are low in Argentina, there are more and more taxes. It is increasingly more difficult to keep one’s head above water. Almost all of my friends are Argentine and they all say the same thing but none earns dollars.
Sorry if I upset you.
Hey Geoff, thanks for the apology. I’m not offended! I just don’t want my blog to turn into a baexpats.org forum where everyone is negative. My goal is to build constructive dialogue where we look at real facts and evidence and try to find the truth together. Again, I agree that there is stress being put on low wage earners right now and that cost of living is rising, but as I stated in another comment to Flay, this argument shifts the scope of my original point, which is that dollar for dollar (or pound for pound, or peso for peso) Argentina is still much cheaper than any first world country. So what it sounds like to me is that we actually agree completely on your correct assessment that wages are not going up as fast as costs are in Argentina (as Frank points out, “living in an inflationary economy”), but again this is tangential to my central point which is that looking at the whole basket of cost of living in BA vs NYC, Londond, LA, etc., the cost is less than half.
On a side note… have you called Accord Salud? GREAT STUFF! I’m not sure of your situation but they have incredible plans for great prices.
Hello! Interesting post but I’m afraid that I have to agree with some of the other comments people have made. You seem to assume that anyone reading is earning a foreign salary, presumably from the US or Western Europe. Most people in Argentina, including non-Argentine natives obviously earn local salaries in Argentine pesos, so to calculate the cost of living you really need to compare prices as a percentage of average salaries. Of course some things, especially public transport and our subsidised utility bills, seem very cheap here if you convert them into dollars or euros and compare the results. (Mind you, somethings don’t work out cheap even that way – I am from the UK and have been back there recently and can confirm that the price of a loaf of bread in “Jumbo” or “Coto” in Capital Federal is almost twice the price of a loaf of bread in a city-centre Tesco supermarket in the UK). But you also have to consider prices as a percentage of income. The mimimum monthly salary in Argentina is about the be raised to 2,800 pesos. That’s about 600 US dollars a month on the official exchange rate. Someone earning the minimum wage in the UK and working a standard 36-hour week would earn close to 900 pounds sterling a month – about 1,400 USD. So the minumum salary in Argentina is half the minimum salary in the UK. According to most statistics I´ve seen, the average monthly salary in Argentina is not a great deal higher than the minimum salary, whereas in the UK the average monthly salary is about 2500 pounds sterling.
Hi Flay!
Thanks for your comment! I would like to ask you, and all of the other commenters who disagree with my point – that Argentina is inexpensive when compared to other major metropolitan cities in the world (it would rank at almost exactly the 50th percentile) – to think about whether we are actually talking about the same subject. My point all along has been that I find it completely untrue that Argentina is “expensive”. You, and others, *correctly* cite that cost of living has increased, and that many people making low wages in Argentina have a tough time paying the bills.
Unfortunately, comments like this fall completely outside the scope of what I am talking about. The only way, in fact, to compare actual expenses in one city (say Buenos Aires) to another city, (say London), is to pick a currency (I arbitrarily picked dollars) and calculate all of your costs in both cities, in that one currency. Doing the exercise that I did, you will find that the total dollars (or pounds or pesos) that you would have to spend to live in London far outweighs, probably in this case by a factor of 3 or 4, the total dollars you would have to spend in Buenos Aires.
Further, you state that I assume that anyone who is reading is earning a foreign salary. Could you please point out where I assume that? I cannot find anywhere, in any text that I have written, where I assume that the readers of this blog (thank you for reading!) are making foreign salaries. I do list prices in dollars but as I state above, this is an arbitrary choice, used only as a device with which to make a comparison. Again, I totally agree that if you are making minimum wage in Argentina you will have a tough time paying your bills. But I find this statement irrelevant to our conversation, especially because in any country, anywhere in the world if you make minimum wage you are going to barely be able to pay your bills. A final statement on this matter is that average wages when compared to costs here were never good! Yes they were better several years ago but when I first got here I had friends working as lawyers making 600 pesos per month (2004-2005). That was when it was 3 to 1 and a steak dinner cost 20 or 25 pesos. But these highly educated people working as professionals could still not afford to live on their own. I hope it is clear that this topic, which could be appropriately categorized as domestic wages in Argentina as compared to cost of living, is separate and distinct from how cost of living in Buenos Aires compares to cost of living in another city in another country.
Finally with respect to your comment on the cost of a loaf of bread. I do know that the cost of a loaf of bread here in Buenos Aires, in the neighborhoods of Palermo and Recoleta, will cost between 12 and 20 pesos depending on where you go and what type of bread you are buying. But if you go to Provincia this cost goes down by a factor or 2… yes it will only cost 6-10 pesos. This is where I find a lot of the stats that expats tend to list to be quite innaccurate. The cost of living in Palermo, Canitas, Recoleta, Belgrano, Nunez, Puerto Madero and even some border neighborhoods is easily twice that of neighborhoods like Villa Urquiza or Chacarita, which remain traditionally Porteno and have not seen the massive influx of foreigners that the aforementioned neighborhoods have, and thus have not raised all of their prices to the same degree. Again, the prices I list in the original post are easily verifiable. I have had many comments saying that “well those prices for rent might be right if you are paying local prices”… but then all of the arguments against my claims assume by their very definition that you are making local wages… so why would you be paying foreign prices! Yes, if you do a short term lease or can’t figure out how to get a garantia, your rent will be more expensive. But looking for 5 minutes on Clarin classifieds or La Nacion classifieds yields *hundreds* of results in the price ranges I specify for rent. And again, if you are making local wages and paying foreign prices then something is wrong!
I hope that helped clear things up.
Thanks!
Thanks for your post. Could you (or anyone) recommend a website that would be a good place to look for an apartment to rent for two months?
just found this website as I am planning a 5-6 week trip there in November. It is useful to get more up to date thoughts and advice on the cost of living in Argentina and( Buenos Aires in particular)The conversation is interesting but as a tourist, not an expat working there, I would find that the `costs`–from what has been written` — in any currency go up and down, but I still see that at almost 5 pesos to the CDn dollar I will not hesitate with my tourist trip.
I will be arriving in BA in a few days time and I would live to know the costs of certain items. For example how much will I typically pay for a cup of coffee, for a bottle of water in a supermarket, for a beer in a bar, for a three course meal in a nice but not too chic restaurant? Etc.
Thanks for any replies to this one.
are you out of your mind !!!!!!!!!!!! i am from buenos aires and live in new york. i travel back and forth and my family lives there. you live in a fantasy. that country is the worst ever. and new york is much cheaper and beautiful than buenos aires !!!!!!!!
I lived there too and am going back but most one bedrooms start at 600-700 in Palermo. The rest of the article was useful though. Good stuff
I don´t know…but if some of you guys (and gals) go and live sometime in Paraguay (were I live since 2009) I think you could call AR CHEAP!! Hands down…no discusion possible here. Right now it´s even DIRT cheap! And no I am not a US Dollar earner….Everything is more expensive here….except electronics,domestic apparatus etc…But food,gas,transportation and rents is way more expensive in PY. A short word about “health insurance”…in Py: expensive…crappy “service”…and many many things are NOT covered in your insurance. Besides that imho many “medics” here seem to got their diplom from a lotery!! Thats why some (rich) paraguyans go abroad IF they have a health problem….and yes they do go to AR or Brasil. About rents in the capital Asuncion…a decent flat for 300 US$…can NOT be found…absolutely impossible (unless you wanna live in some dump in a crappy area were you get mugged every day)…think more 600 $ or even more…!! And keep in mind salaries in Paraguay are even lower as in AR!! Nuff said. OOO and the thing about buses putting out black smoke from the exhaustpipe…again Paraguay is wayyyy worse!!(no I am not kidding you) Right now my wife and I are looking to settle down in Argentina (Corrientes area) just because our kid has a health problem and PY is just NO option for treatment. She is a registrated nurse so she could get a job. my 2 cents. Excuse my bad English…it´s not my native language.