Where your salary stretches furthest in 2026

By Jodi Donnelly, Research & Analysis Lead Published June 2026

Every cost figure on this page is a CostLiving moderate-tier estimate, and every salary figure is sourced from the ONS and converted at the 2 June 2026 exchange rate. The result is reproducible, line by line, in our calculator.

On a £70,000 take-home of about $5,487/mo, a single person clears more than $4,000/mo of surplus in Chiang Mai after a full moderate lifestyle. Source: CostLiving moderate-tier estimate (single person, 1-bed mid-tier); ONS ASHE, April 2025 (published October 2025); GBP/USD 1.3454, 2 June 2026.

How we worked this out

The method behind this page is deliberately simple, because simple is what makes it reproducible. We take a fixed monthly take-home pay, subtract the local moderate-tier cost of living for a single person, and call what is left the monthly surplus. That surplus is the spendable and saveable margin, the part of your pay that is not already spoken for by rent, food, transport and bills.

Two reference salaries anchor the analysis. The first is the median UK full-time salary of £39,039 gross (ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, April 2025 data, published October 2025), which nets roughly £2,636 a month. The second is a higher earner on £70,000, who nets roughly £4,078 a month on a 2026/27 PAYE calculation. We convert both to US dollars at GBP/USD 1.3454 (Federal Reserve and market rate, 2 June 2026), because a single base currency is the only honest way to line up Bangkok against Berlin. That puts the median take-home at about $3,546/mo and the £70k take-home at about $5,487/mo.

The cost-of-living side comes from CostLiving's own moderate-tier estimates: a single person in a one-bedroom, mid-tier flat, living a moderate lifestyle rather than a frugal or a comfortable one. Those city totals are fixed, drawn from our costs cache. The only assumption that moves is the take-home, and both salary nets here are confirmed against current 2026/27 PAYE. The surplus column is computed against those live take-home figures and the live calculator output, so that the page and the tool always agree.

Every number you see below can be rebuilt in the CostLiving calculator. Drop in your own salary, pick a city, and the calculator returns the same moderate-tier total and the same surplus. The calculator is the proof as much as it is the call to action, and it is where this page wants you to end up.

Where does my salary go furthest?

The short answer for a UK earner in 2026 is Southeast Asia and Latin America. A £70k take-home of about $5,487/mo goes furthest in Chiang Mai, where the moderate cost of a single-person life is just $1,325/mo. That leaves $4,162/mo of surplus, more than three-quarters of the take-home untouched. Medellín and Tbilisi sit next, both at $1,525/mo moderate and $3,962/mo surplus, followed by Kuala Lumpur ($1,575/mo, $3,912/mo surplus) and Bangkok ($1,750/mo, $3,737/mo surplus).

The pattern holds as you climb the table. Cape Town leaves $3,687/mo, Buenos Aires $3,462/mo, Budapest $3,412/mo and Mexico City $3,312/mo. Even Athens, the gateway to the eurozone on this list, leaves $3,287/mo behind. These are not subsistence numbers. They are the figures you get after a moderate lifestyle is already paid for, which is the whole point of framing it this way: it is surplus on top of comfort, not surplus instead of it.

For the median UK earner on about $3,546/mo, the geography is the same even if the headroom is smaller. The batch is clear that a median salary still leaves a comfortable margin across most of Latin America and Southeast Asia. Where it stops working is the obvious place: a median take-home runs a deficit in Zurich, Geneva and central London, the cities where moderate cost of living simply exceeds what a median wage nets. That asymmetry, that the same salary is a saving in one city and a deficit in another, is the single most useful thing this page can tell you.

How much is a £70k salary worth in Lisbon or Bangkok?

This is the question that turns an abstract pay packet into a decision, so it deserves a direct answer. Your £70k London salary, which nets about $5,487/mo, is worth dramatically more the moment it leaves London. In London itself, the moderate cost of a single-person life is $4,525/mo, which leaves under $1,000/mo spare. In Lisbon, the moderate cost is $2,575/mo, leaving $2,912/mo of surplus. That is the line worth remembering: your £70k London salary stretches roughly three times further in Lisbon than it does at home.

In Bangkok the same salary is transformed again. Moderate cost there is $1,750/mo, so the surplus is $3,737/mo, nearly four times the London surplus and with money still left for the things London made you skip. A Lisbon one-bedroom rents for about €1,250/mo on an asking-and-contracted blend in early 2026 (Idealista and INE Portugal), which is the kind of grounded local figure that explains why the Portuguese capital keeps winning the remote-worker vote.

Which cities are best value for a high earner in 2026?

For a high earner, value is best read as surplus per month, and the full table below ranks 19 destinations from best value to least on a £70k take-home of about $5,487/mo. The top of the table is Southeast Asia and Latin America; the foot is Western Europe, where the surplus shrinks but, tellingly, never disappears.

Read down the table and a few patterns earn their place. The European value tier is real and it is large: Budapest at $3,412/mo, Valencia at $3,162/mo and Warsaw at $3,162/mo all leave a high earner with more surplus than many people earn in total, while staying inside or beside the EU. The Iberian cluster of Porto, Valencia, Lisbon, Madrid and Barcelona is tightly grouped between $2,762/mo and $3,212/mo of surplus, which is why "move to Spain or Portugal" is the default high-earner fantasy and, on these numbers, a defensible one.

The bottom of the table is the quiet headline. Even Berlin, the least generous city here, leaves a £70k earner $2,412/mo of surplus, comfortably more than London's sub-$1,000/mo. The lesson is not that Western Europe is cheap. It is that London is the outlier, and that almost anywhere a high earner moves, their salary starts working harder. Whether you are weighing up Lisbon, Berlin or somewhere on the other side of the world, the calculator will hold your exact salary against the exact city and show the surplus, every figure reproducible.

Where can I save the most working remotely?

If your income is portable and your goal is to save rather than to spend, the maths is brutal and clear. The biggest savings on a £70k take-home come at the top of the table: Chiang Mai ($4,162/mo surplus), Medellín and Tbilisi ($3,962/mo each), Kuala Lumpur ($3,912/mo) and Bangkok ($3,737/mo). A remote worker banking the surplus in Chiang Mai is setting aside close to $50,000 a year, after living a moderate, not a frugal, life.

That is the case for the pay rise you give yourself by moving. The same London salary that leaves under $1,000/mo to save at home leaves over $4,000/mo to save in northern Thailand, with Hanoi and Medellín close behind. For remote earners the question is rarely whether they can afford a given city; it is how much of the same salary they get to keep. On these figures the answer ranges from almost nothing in central London to the overwhelming majority of take-home in the best-value cities.

A median UK earner on about $3,546/mo cannot save quite as aggressively, but the direction of travel is identical: a comfortable margin across most of Latin America and Southeast Asia, and a deficit only in the most expensive cities. Wherever you sit on the salary scale, the move that grows your savings fastest is the same move, and the CostLiving calculator will tell you your number for any city on the list.

Jodi Donnelly

Research & Analysis Lead

Jodi studied at University College Dublin and spent several years as a researcher at Irish legacy media before moving into independent coverage of fintech and data-driven business. At CostLiving she leads research and analysis, reviewing source data, validating cost estimates against primary references, and writing the methodology documentation. She is the first line of quality control on anything that gets published.

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