Compare cities and set hardship allowances for your internationally mobile workforce
Consider these questions...
- Do you have clear, objective information on quality of living differences between cities around the world?
- Can you easily assess competitive hardship allowances for your employees on international assignments?
- Are you consistent when setting your hardship allowances around the world? Can you justify them objectively?
- Are your allowances based on significant international quality of living factors?
Obtain the right solution
To encourage employment mobility and keep abreast of the competition, you need reliable information to help you calculate fair, consistent assignee allowances. Based on 39 factors within ten categories, Mercer’s Quality of Living Reports contain all the key elements you need to calculate hardship allowances for transfers to more than 500 cities worldwide. “Hardship allowance” refers to premium compensation paid to assignees who experience – or should expect to experience – a significant deterioration in living conditions in their new host location.
Mercer's Quality of Living Methodology was developed by an international team of Mercer professionals, working closely with major multinational companies and other experts in the field. Our Quality of Living Reports are released annually, in early November.”
Key features and benefits
- Tangible values for qualitative perceptions to establish an objective assessment of the quality of living for transfers for 444 standard locations worldwide and more than 60 others available as custom requests.
- Carefully selected factors representing the criteria considered most relevant to international assignees.
- A detailed outline of how we establish quality-of-living differentials between cities.
- A City-to-City Index Comparison that summarizes the difference in the quality of living between any two cities.
- The Quality of Living index for the city and access to a detailed breakdown of the category scores that form the resulting index.
- Our online Quality-of-Living Calculator that allows you to customize the Quality of Living index to your specific needs.
- A score report summarizing the Quality of Living differences for each of the 39 factors.
- Mercer’s recommended Quality of Living Allowance Grid that allows you to translate the quality of living index into percentage benefits and define competitive hardship allowances where applicable.
The total index is based on the following categories:
- Consumer goods
- Economic environment
- Housing
- Medical and health considerations
- Natural environment
- Political and social environment
- Public services and transport
- Recreation
- Schools and education
- Socio-cultural environment