Your Reality Check
The indexes tell you what things cost. This tells you what they cost you. Enter your take-home pay, your city and your household, and watch the real cost of living land on your payslip — in rands, or in the hours of work it actually takes to cover.
Your situation
Essentials alone take almost everything you bring home. There's little left for the unexpected.
How we work it out
Every figure is built from Chankura’s live indexes, mapped onto your situation with a few plain, stated assumptions. We’d rather show our working than hide it.
- Rent uses the median 1-bedroom asking rent for your city. Cape Town is our live rent index; the other cities are indicative estimates until we hold live data for each.
- Groceries start from our nationwide essentials basket (priced for a household of four) and scale to your household size.
- Transport assumes roughly 120 litres of fuel a month if you drive, or two minibus-taxi trips a workday if you don’t — priced at the current pump and SANTACO fares.
- Load-shedding is our Stage 4 household estimate — generator fuel, food spoilage and lost productivity. It’s a model, not a bill, and we label it as such.
- Hours of work convert any rand figure using a 173-hour working month, so you can see a cost as the time it takes to earn, not just the price.
This is a model to make the squeeze visible, not a budget or financial advice. Your real numbers will differ — that’s the point of letting you change them. Want the tax side too? Try the salary calculator to turn a gross salary into take-home first.