Is Gothenburg an affordable place to live? A typical resident spends around 24.4% of income on rent and 8.3% on food. That leaves approximately 67.2% of income available for savings and daily expenses.
The Urban Stress Index (USI) provides a structured way to evaluate cost-of-living pressure in Gothenburg. By combining housing and essential food costs, it highlights how much income is required to maintain a basic standard of living relative to local wages.
| Item | Monthly | % of Income |
|---|---|---|
| Income | 40,500 | — |
| Rent (1BR) | 9,896 | 24.4% |
| Essential Food | 3,380 | 8.3% |
| Remaining | 27,224 | 67.2% |
Use our cost of living calculator to estimate your own disposable income in Gothenburg.
Gothenburg records a USI of 32.78, placing it in the stretched category and making it one of the more balanced large cities in Sweden. The affordability pattern is straightforward: housing is the main source of pressure, but the overall burden remains fairly controlled. Rent absorbs about 24.4% of a typical monthly gross salary, while essential food takes another 8.3%, the lowest food share in this Swedish cluster. That helps explain why Gothenburg remains somewhat more manageable than Malmo and much more functional than Stockholm. In practical terms, Gothenburg is not a low-cost city, but it is a city where the wage-to-essentials relationship still works reasonably well by broader European standards.
The local economic structure supports that result. Gothenburg benefits from manufacturing, engineering, logistics, port activity, automotive-related industry, higher education, health care, and a broad regional labor market. That gives it a more diversified productive base than many secondary cities of similar size. Compared with Stockholm, Gothenburg is far more functional because the housing premium is much lighter relative to salary. Compared with Malmo, it performs a little better because food and rent together take slightly less of income. Compared with Uppsala, Gothenburg is only marginally tighter, and the two cities belong to a very similar overall tier.
Within Sweden, Gothenburg sits below Stockholm and Malmo, and very close to Uppsala. That makes it one of the strongest-performing major-city cases in the Swedish system. The ranking is useful because it shows that Sweden’s second city does not automatically become a high-pressure housing case. Instead, Gothenburg remains stretched but functional, with a more moderate burden than the capital and a broadly manageable ratio between salary and essentials. Compared with cities such as Manchester, Lille, or Toulouse, Gothenburg fits comfortably into the more balanced part of the European stretched-middle range.
Internationally, Gothenburg remains much more manageable than Amsterdam, Dublin, London, or Paris, while still somewhat tighter than the most comfortable German benchmarks such as Cologne or Leipzig. Overall, Gothenburg is best understood as a stretched but clearly functional Swedish industrial-and-port city. Housing is the main pressure point, food is relatively moderate, and the city remains livable because wages still offset essentials well enough to preserve meaningful room in the budget for a typical single earner.
The Urban Stress Index (USI) measures how much of a typical income is spent on housing and essential food.
USI = Housing burden + Food cost share.
See full methodology here.
Income data for Swedish cities are based on Average monthly salary in the municipalities - Statistikdatabasen, published by Statistics Sweden (SCB), using municipality-level average monthly salary as the income benchmark for each city.
Rental data are based on Numbeo’s Apartment (1 bedroom) in City Centre price, used as the housing benchmark for each Swedish city.
Food cost estimates use Numbeo’s Meal at an Inexpensive Restaurant price as a standardized essential meal-cost proxy.
For full explanation of assumptions, see the Methodology and Sources pages.
Other cities in Sweden:
Other cities outside Sweden: