What Does US$2,500 a Month Buy?

On these figures, US$2,500 covers one person in all nine countries.

By Neil Solomon · 5 min read

Picture a couple named Genevieve and Lucius, both 67. Together their Social Security and a small pension come to US$2,500 a month. A friend told them that sum "goes a long way in Portugal." Lucius wrote the number on the back of an envelope and propped it against the fruit bowl. Then Genevieve asked the question that mattered. "Is that for one of us, or for both?"

They looked for a single table that answered it. Most sites gave one price for one person. So they built their own from the figures below.

Where the figures come from

Rent, utilities, phone, transport and food come from Numbeo, a site where residents and visitors type in what they pay. That makes it crowd-sourced. It is useful, and it is also a set of opinions, so each number is a guide. We used its country pages updated in October 2026. The rent is the average city-centre one-bedroom across the cities Numbeo lists. A smaller town may cost less.

Health cover is the weakest line. Spain publishes a public-system rate of €157 a month at 65 and over, about US$175. News reports give about US$95 a month in Mexico, US$68 in Colombia and US$85 in Ecuador. Whether each applies to a foreign retiree is a question for the office. For Portugal, Panama, Costa Rica, Thailand and Greece, we have no checked source. We used US$150 a person as a placeholder, and the evidence for it is NOT CHECKED, so those five rows move with it.

Exchange rate: European Central Bank reference rates for 7 October 2026. One euro was US$1.1177, 20.22 Mexican pesos or 37.66 Thai baht, which makes US$1 about 18.09 pesos and about 33.7 baht. Numbeo converts at slightly different rates, about 1% apart.

The couple column is our estimate. We kept one rent, raised utilities by 15%, added a second phone and transport pass, raised food by 1.8 times, doubled the meals out and added a second health premium. No survey measures this directly.

Every row uses the same list of items, priced in each country. It is a basket of ordinary spending, and it is not the same as the "1 in 10" way of living in our calculator. A basket that matches your way of living may cost more or less.

Greek and Thai rents have no second source in our notes, and Athens and Thai resort rents are widely reported higher, so those two rows are the least certain. Sums are rounded and may differ by a dollar.

Two notes on the US$2,500. First, the table compares costs with money in hand, so it matters whether US$2,500 is the amount before or after tax and before or after the deductions that come out of Social Security, such as the Medicare premium. If it is the amount before those, the money they can spend is smaller. Second, a fair test also prices their present home the same way, with the same items, so they can see how far US$2,500 goes now. We have not done that here.

What Genevieve and Lucius saw

On these figures, US$2,500 covers one person in all nine countries. For two, the estimate runs above US$2,500 in five of them.

"So we would be about US$311 short in Portugal," Lucius said.

"If both of us carry insurance and rent in the centre," Genevieve said. "Our rent would be the big line. What does a flat outside the centre cost?"

That question is the useful one. Rent is the largest single line, and a flat outside the centre may cost less. Health cover is the least certain line.