⚖Living Wage Calculator

Is that salary enough
for a decent life?

Work out the living wage for your city using the Anker methodology adopted by the Global Living Wage Coalition — your figures, calculated in your browser, nothing sent anywhere.

Monthly cost of living for a typical household

Monthly living wage per worker—
Total costs—
Emergency margin—
Wage earners—

The default figures are illustrative only and are not a reference for any country — replace them with your city's actual prices.

The formula: (food + housing + other essentials) × (1 + emergency margin) ÷ wage earners per household. This is the same formula the Living Wage Calculator inside ILORA runs on.

01The definition

What is a living wage?

A living wage is not the legal minimum wage. The minimum is a number set by legislation and can lag reality by years; a living wage is calculated from the actual cost of living — what a worker needs to afford their household a nutritious diet, decent housing and the other essentials, plus a small margin for emergencies, from a normal working week with no overtime.

02In the product

And inside ILORA — across your whole team

AI fills in your country's numbers

Pick a country and region and AI estimates the food, housing and essentials costs for a typical household there — you review and adjust before anything is saved.

Your whole workforce, benchmarked

One screen shows who earns below the living wage, who sits on the edge, and the exact monthly cost of closing the gap.

Ready for fair-pay reporting

Benchmarks per region with their sources and effective years — the evidence ESG questionnaires and enterprise clients now ask suppliers for.

See the full HR & Payroll module →

03FAQ

Questions, answered

What's the difference between a living wage and the minimum wage?
The minimum wage is a legal figure set by the state, and it can stay fixed while prices climb. A living wage is calculated from a real basket of living costs in a specific region and year, so it moves with reality. In many markets the living wage sits materially above the legal minimum.
What is the Anker methodology?
A methodology developed by Richard and Martha Anker and adopted by the Global Living Wage Coalition. It estimates the cost of a low-cost nutritious diet, basic decent housing and the remaining essentials for a typical household, adds a small margin for unexpected events, then divides by the number of wage earners in that household.
Why divide by the number of wage earners?
Because a typical household rarely lives on one income. Dividing by the average number of full-time wage earners (commonly between 1.4 and 1.9) gives the share each worker needs to provide out of the household's total requirement.
Do you store the numbers I enter here?
No. This page calculates entirely inside your browser and sends nothing to a server. Saving benchmarks and running employee-level analysis happen only inside your own ILORA account.
How does ILORA run this across my whole team?
You create a benchmark for each region you operate in — AI estimates the figures and you review them — and the system compares every employee's gross salary against it, showing who falls below the living wage and the monthly cost of closing the gap.

See your whole team against this benchmark.

A 30-minute demo on your own numbers.

Book a demo