Lebanon Has the Highest Cost of Living and the Lowest Income
Rising living costs and surging commodity prices, particularly for consumer goods, pose recurring challenges for many countries around the world. Yet the challenges facing Lebanon are compounded compared with those of other nations, as high prices go hand in hand with a sharp collapse in the purchasing power of low-income earners within a dollarised, import-dependent economy.
Since the outbreak of the financial and economic crisis in the autumn of 2019, the Lebanese have lived under the weight of an equation that is at once simple and harsh, raising the question of how to afford the cost of living in a country whose prices approach those of wealthy nations, while incomes shrink to levels closer to those of the poorest countries in the region.
At the same time, the Lebanese face an increasingly complex reality of daily life amid the absence of a clear policy to index wages to inflation rates, and the stalling of comprehensive tax reform meant to achieve fairness across social groups and redistribute burdens in proportion to each group's ability to pay. This keeps Lebanon a high-cost, low-income country, caught in a constant contradiction between prices and incomes, and between aspirations and means.
Lebanon ranks high on the global cost-of-living scale, with a cost-of-living index of nearly 40.5 points, placing it 70th globally in mid-2025, according to indicators from the global website Numbeo, and ahead of Arab countries that enjoy larger and more stable economies. Beirut ranked sixth among Middle Eastern cities and 168th globally in terms of the cost of living, according to the same index.
At the level of individual income, average disposable per capita income, according to the global website Numbeo, stands at roughly $6,144 a year in 2025, close to the pre-crisis minimum wage. Meanwhile, the cost of a "survival food basket" for a family of five amounts to around 44.2 million Lebanese pounds, or the equivalent of roughly $492, according to data from the World Food Programme (WFP) at the end of May 2025, an increase of around 8.2% since the beginning of the year.
By contrast, a comparison of the overall cost of living between Lebanon and Jordan shows that the latter is roughly 18% cheaper, with a wider gap in rents, as rents in Lebanon are about two-thirds higher than in Jordan. Even on a limited income, a Jordanian lives in an environment where the cost of living is proportionate to earnings and marked by stability in currency value and purchasing power compared with a Lebanese counterpart.
As for the minimum wage in Jordan, it stands at nearly 260 dinars (around $360), with a more stable salary structure and slower inflation (inflation is nearly 1% only). Meanwhile, average annual income is estimated at around 19,000 dinars, or roughly 1,500 dinars a month, which in US dollars exceeds $2,100, meaning a monthly income more than double its counterpart in Lebanon for most middle-income groups.
In Egypt, meanwhile, the cost of living is 60% to 65% lower than the cost of living in Lebanon, despite high inflation and the depreciation of the pound's exchange rate. The average monthly salary in Egypt stands at around 14,000 Egyptian pounds, or nearly $280 a month, with a minimum wage in the public and private sectors hovering around 7,000 pounds.
Yet the cost of daily life in Egypt, from housing to food, is far lower than in Lebanon, especially since the income/price equation gives earnings a purchasing power that allows Egyptians to meet these costs with less hardship than the Lebanese endure to meet comparable needs.
In the Gulf states, several cities top the list of the most expensive Arab cities in cost of living, particularly in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and the UAE ranked first in the Arab world in cost of living according to the 2025 index, with an index exceeding 54 points. While the cost of housing, entertainment and living in general in Dubai or Doha is high, income levels there are also several times higher.
If we compare the costs of a lunch meal or a hotel stay between Beirut and Dubai, we find that costs are close and the difference is slight in most cases, though this does not mean that prices in Dubai are more expensive than they are in Beirut. The comparison must follow the equation of income versus cost, in which cost constitutes a percentage of income, and thus the higher an individual's income, the lower the cost as a share of earnings, even when the price is identical. This comparison holds true for the rest of the Gulf states as well as for Jordan and Egypt.
What makes Lebanon's economic crisis more complex lies in a rise in the cost of living that is out of proportion to the purchasing power of its citizens. Prices match their counterparts in high-income countries, while wage levels are low alongside dilapidated public services, from drinking water and electricity to healthcare and education.
The high cost of living and rising prices from which Lebanon suffers are not a passing or temporary crisis, but a deep structural crisis that goes beyond the bounds of global inflation and is directly linked to the presence of monopolies that obstruct any genuine economic improvement, the absence of structural reforms, and the severe weakness afflicting the public administrations responsible for price monitoring and consumer protection.
What is needed today is not mere stopgap solutions, but the formulation of a comprehensive national strategy that links salaries and wages to the cost-of-living index on the one hand, and works to improve the quality and continuity of services, alongside regulating markets and combating monopolies, on the other, by activating oversight bodies and granting them executive powers to curb pricing chaos and merchant greed. The former would achieve living stability for the Lebanese and enable them to confront their daily challenges, while the latter would once again make Lebanon a destination for tourists and restore some vitality to the Lebanese economy.
Translated from Arabic with AI. Read it in Arabic