Cost of Living information solutions

Your key to designing efficient assignment compensation

Paying assignees fairly for a new location is hard — overpay and it costs you, underpay and they push back. This solution gives you the data to calculate defensible COLAs and the details to explain them, so your assignees accept the results.

What you get

• Reliable, city- and country-level baskets refreshed at least biannually and built from assignee spending research.
• Flexible methodologies and configurable baskets to match your mobility policy and employee mix.
• A modern, user-friendly calculator interface for fast COLA calculations, estimates, and exports.

How it can help

• Deliver fair, evidence-based COLAs that hold up to stakeholder and audit review.
• Compare purchasing power across origins and destinations to set competitive, consistent allowances.
• Speed up decision-making and reduce manual work with ready-to-share estimates and exportable data.

Cost of Living calculation methodologies

No two mobility programs are the same, so you get two approaches to choose from — pick the one that matches how you compensate your assignees.

Multinational approach

This approach calculates your cost-of-living differentials from a blended international spending pattern. It assumes spending patterns converge across expatriates of many nationalities, so the weighting of goods and services stays the same for every location. You compare prices of similar brands from similar retail outlets in both the home city and the host city.

Use this when you want one consistent standard across a diverse assignee population. You get differentials for more than 400 cities worldwide.

Nationality-specific approach

This approach uses indices and differentials based on the unique spending patterns in your assignees' home locations. Because it applies different weights for each home country or market, it helps your expatriates maintain the spending habits they're used to in their host locations. You compare prices in the home country or market from a local-national perspective against prices in the host city from an expatriate perspective.

Use this when you want each assignee's package to reflect where they're actually coming from. You get cost-of-living data for more than 400 host and 190 home locations.

Request demo