Cost of living in Beijing for expats

[Claire35]

Hi Everyone

My husband and I are looking to move to China within 6 months and wondered if any of you out there (especially expats) can give us an idea on the cost of living in Beijing. For example renting a new/nearly new fully furnished 2 bedroom apartment plus electric,water and gas etc with rough idea on food costs and anything else we should be aware of. Any figures in sterling please.

Cliare

[Lu]

I just found a 6200 yuan/month 2-bedroom apartment, after seeing many more of those in the 6000-6500 yuan range, all furnished and most new. Of course you can easily find something more expensive, and cheaper places are also available, although those wouldn't be as nice.

(I don't know the current sterling to yuan rate, so you'll need to convert the rates yourself.)

[jmhcali]

As for food costs, everything here is cheap by western standards, except western food. If you eat at mid-price restaurants that ordinary Chinese eat in, you can stuff yourselves for 30-50RMB per person, max, and at that you'll probably have leftovers. Of course if you go to grocery stores/food markets and do your own cooking you can get by on half of that or less. "Western" restaurants like Pizza Hut and Starbucks cost as much or more here as they do at home (Pizza Hut costs about 25% more) and "luxury import goods" like cheese are quite pricey, not to mention not stocked in your neighborhood market. So the cost really depends on how much you want to cook, primarily, and secondarily how much you are willing to adapt to Chinese foodstuffs.

At the low end (cooking all meals with no cheese, grape wine, Her Majesty's Proper English Tea blend, pre-made tomato sauce, etc.): probably 30-40 RMB per person per day.

Mid-range would be double or triple that, depending on what you do for breakfast. Triple if you want to eat western food once a week or so. So call it 100-120RMB/person/day.

At today's conversion rate, 30-50RMB is 2.83-4.71 pounds; 100-120RMB is 9.42-11.30 pounds. So you can see that's a fairly wide range depending on your personal choices. I suspect you'd start at the high end and your costs would drop as you acclimated yourselves.

This is just food and does not include any estimates of fuel costs, or the value of the time you would spend cooking and/or at the grocery store looking at random objects and saying "What IS this?"

Also does not include the cost of bottled water, which I can't give you a good estimate on.