What is your salary actually worth abroad?

Cost-of-living calculators assume you convert money at the mid-market rate — the rate you see on Google, which no consumer is ever offered. The difference between that rate and what you are actually quoted is the provider’s FX markup, and it is the largest hidden cost in living on foreign income.

We measured it. Across 2.37 million archived quotes, Starling averages 0.11% markup and PayPal averages 4.76%. That 4.65pp gap is not a rounding error — on a salary moved abroad every year it compounds into thousands, for identical money and identical timing.

It also matters far more than most people expect on moves between similarly priced countries. We charted it across 83 countries: a US-to-UK move lifts buying power about 6%, and the wrong provider takes roughly 84% of that gain back.

Purchasing power uses the World Bank’s International Comparison Program figure for household final consumption (PA.NUS.PRVT.PP), covering 83 countries for 2024–2025. It is official statistical data rather than crowdsourced survey responses, which is a deliberate choice — the common criticism of consumer cost-of-living indices is that self-reported entries reflect who bothered to fill in the form.

• Country-level, not city-level. Lisbon and rural Portugal share one figure. For anywhere with a wide internal spread, treat this as the national average it is.
• Purchasing power is not quality of life. This answers what your money buys, not whether you will enjoy living somewhere. Safety, healthcare, climate and visa rules are not in it.
• Markups are provider averages across all corridors, not a live quote for your pair. Use the corridor links for the real number today.
• Tax is excluded. Income tax and social contributions vary enormously and often swamp the differences shown here.
• PPP data lags. The latest ICP figures are 2024–2025; exchange rates are from 2026-08-19. In high-inflation economies the gap between those two dates matters.

Source: World Bank, International Comparison Program (PA.NUS.PRVT.PP). Exchange rates and provider markups: SendMoneyCompare quote archive, updated every 6 hours.