142 cities: what you pay vs. who lives there

Rent against the male-to-female ratio at ages 20–39, one dot per city. 40 of 142 are cheaper than the median and have more women than men.

Dot area is population. Colour is the same ratio the vertical axis shows, on the site's own 94/100/112 scale — green has more women, red more men.

What the chart says

1. Cheap and female-skewed is not rare. 40 of 142 cities sit below the median cost and below 100 men per 100 women. The trade-off most people assume — that a good ratio costs money — does not show up in the data.
2. Cost explains almost nothing about the ratio. The expensive column runs from 93 to 111; the cheap column runs from 86 to 126. Price sorts cities on comfort, not on demographics.

All 201

The chart labels 22 cities. Here is every one of them, cheapest ratio first.

Ratio is men per 100 women aged 20–39 from the city's own census age×sex arrays — never a country figure standing in for a city. Cost is a single person including rent. Salary is net monthly, where Numbeo publishes one.

Where this is wrong

• Cost and ratio come from different places and different dates. The ratio is a national census; the cost is a Numbeo crowd-sourced panel. They are plotted together because that is the decision people actually make, not because they share a methodology.
• 23 cities are held back, not missing. Every UK city, and most of Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea, ship census arrays that are not population counts — a few hundred people against multi-million cities, and Belfast computing to 158 men per 100 women off 173 people. They are excluded until the source is rebuilt.
• Japan's four cities are wards, not metros — the ratio as well as the population. Tokyo here is a single ward of 316,000, not the 14-million city; Fukuoka, Osaka and Sapporo are the same. Their ratios are real and well-sampled, but they describe that ward. Read Fukuoka's 75.2 as a ward figure, not as the city, and expect the metro number to sit far closer to 100.
• The median cost line moves as cities are added. It is a property of this set of 142, not a fixed price point.

Sources

Age by sex: national statistics offices, per market, at the finest published level — see methodology for the per-country source table. Cost of living: Numbeo, single person including rent, July 2026. Built with Python and matplotlib; the renderer is geomax/viz/chart_cost_ratio.py.

The same numbers drive the research desk, where you can filter and sort every city on this chart, and city rankings.

The per-market deep-dives — 13 tabs of cost, visa, tax, safety and sub-national ratio for one country — are behind the Pro gate. Everything on this page is not.