Living Costs – Cape Town (South Africa) in 2017

To get an idea of what things cost in any place it’s always good to compare it to the salary related to the type of job you do. Unfortunately, I can’t cover all career paths and salaries hence I’m only going to use my husband’s salary as reference. He is a software developer with a computer and electronic engineering degree. Software developing is also one of the more well-paid jobs in South Africa. I’m currently not working but if I worked as a teacher I would probably have brought home a salary less than half of his. His salary is about R30,000 but after tax he takes home approximately R26,000. There are no benefits such as medical, dental etc.

We are located in the northern suburbs about 20 minutes drive away from the city center. We live in a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment for which we pay R6000 per month. It’s not furnished and it doesn’t come with appliances. But we got very lucky with our rent. Most places for rent in the northern suburbs are usually R7500 and up. You can probably get a place for less than R6000 but in most cases that place will be in a bad neigbourhood. Furnished apartments in the city centre will be approximately R16,000 and up.

The transportation system in South Africa is not for everyone. The MyCiti busses are doing quite well but they mostly run in the city center and don’t go very far. You can check out their fares here: Fare-calculator. But with most other public transportation in Cape Town, you probably won’t feel very safe. Especially the trains and minibus taxi’s. Minibus taxi's are well-known for reckless driving and trains aren't always on time. My point is if you’re here long term you’ll defintely need your own car to get around. We have two cars...one fully paid off (we got lucky again) and for the other one we took out a loan and pay off R4000/ month. Although you don’t have to have car insurance it’s highly recommended (because...minibus taxi’s). For both cars we pay R1600/month for insurance. We only live a few kilometers away from his work, so for petrol for both cars we pay about R1000/month. Petrol prices are around R13 a litre at this point.

You do not want to end up in a public hospital. In order to avoid going to a public hospital it’s highly recommended that you have a medical plan. Then you can go to a private hospital that provides much better care. For medical we pay R2600/month. It’s only a hospital plan so it doesn’t cover a doctor, dentist, physiotherapist or any specialist visits. It also doesn’t cover X-rays or MRI’s unless you were hospitalized. Thus we set aside approximately R1500/month for doctor’s etc. visits.

For Internet we pay R400/month for uncapped ADSL at 4MBps. You must have a telephone line installed in order for the Internet to work...for that we pay about R250/month. We use pre-paid cellphones which we don’t use a whole lot and hardly ever make calls so we usually pay less than R100/month for both of our phones (We generally only communicate via Whatsapp while connected to our home wifi). Our apartment’s electricity also works on a pay-as-you-go system and we load about R250/month on it. We keep our geyser switched off during the day and use a gas stove which really helps keep the electricity usage low.

For food and toiletries we pay approximately R3000/month. Since I’m allergic to milk protein we have to buy soya milk which is much more expensive than cow’s milk. Such restrictions in one’s diet pushes up the grocery price. For gym membership for both of us we pay R350/month (We get a huge discount because of our medical plan).

Other expenses such as gas for the stove, tithes to the church, investments, life insurance, savings etc. costs us approximately R5000/month.