Is Benoni SA’s most expensive place?

In a recent article published by Business Tech, “The cheapest and most expensive cities in South Africa”, Benoni was listed as the most expensive city or town in South Africa.

January 28, 2017

1 minute read

The article used data compiled by Expatistan, a website indexing the cost of living in cities across the globe.

The list used in the article placed Benoni above six other cities, including, in descending order of expense, Bhisho, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town, Orkney and Durban.

However, according to Gerardo Robledillo, founder of Expatistan, Benoni’s index on his website is not an accurate picture of the cost of living in the town.

“These prices are lacking data. It provides a decent estimate, but they aren’t yet reliable.” the software engineer said.

“As of January 24, we have 106 price entries for Benoni in total.

“However, only 85 of those prices are currently used for the calculation; the rest are either more than 12 months old, discarded as having mistakes or otherwise considered unusable.”

Robledillo further said nine people entered prices for Benoni, though only the contributions of five are used, for the same reasons as with price entries.

On Expatistan, Benoni was given a score of 133, meaning it is 33 per cent more expensive than the reference city used by the website, which is Prague, in the Czech Republic.

Taking the number of valid price entries and people who entered prices into account, Robledillo gave a more precise list of the most expensive cities in the Rainbow Nation:

1 Johannesburg – 114

2 Pretoria – 112

3 Cape Town – 111

4 Durban – 97.