bunq Working Abroad Index figures put Bristol above Paris on monthly living costs. The 2026 edition covers rent, groceries, utilities, broadband and transport across 75 cities. Bristol lands at £1,908 a month and Brighton at £1,890. Both now cost more than Stockholm, Paris, Berlin or Frankfurt.

Inside the bunq Working Abroad Index

In the European table, Bristol ranks seventh and Brighton ninth. That puts them ahead of Munich, Rotterdam and every major German city in the set.

The bunq Working Abroad gap comes almost entirely from rent. bunq puts average monthly rent at £1,287 in Bristol and £1,273 in Brighton, against £1,058 in Paris, £965 in Berlin and £942 in Frankfurt. So rent eats 67 percent of total living costs in the two English cities, compared with 62 percent in Paris and 58 percent in Berlin and Frankfurt.

That tracks with real data. July ONS figures showed average UK private rents up an estimated 3.3 percent in the 12 months to June 2026. Meanwhile bunq calculates that a Bristol-to-Paris move saves roughly £2,265 a year, and Brighton-to-Berlin about £2,564. Edinburgh and Manchester also outrank Frankfurt.

Meanwhile London stays in a league of its own at £2,810 a month, Europe’s most expensive by a wide margin. Globally, bunq puts it below New York, San Francisco and Boston. Joe Wilson, who holds the title of Chief Evangelist at bunq, framed the finding around Brighton and Bristol losing their pull as the cheaper landing spot for remote workers.

Where the bunq Working Abroad numbers come from

Here is the detail that matters most, and the release buries it in a methodology note. Notably, the rent, grocery, utility and internet figures come from Numbeo, as of July 2026. Numbeo is a crowdsourced database built from user submissions, not an official statistical source. Here rent is averaged across a one-bedroom flat in the city centre and one outside it. Utilities assume an 85 square metre apartment.

That is a reasonable way to build the bunq Working Abroad comparison. Still, it is not research in the sense a bank’s economics team would use the word. It is a repackaging of an open database with a ranking laid over the top.

What the bunq Working Abroad Index is really for

Worth saying plainly: this is not product news. Instead it is content marketing wrapped in a spreadsheet, a genre bunq leans on more than most consumer fintechs.

The proof is in the distribution. In fact bunq did not publish one index. It published localised versions of the same dataset for different press markets on the same day. UK outlets got Bristol and Brighton beating Paris. Canadian outlets got Vancouver and Toronto out-renting Paris and Berlin. American readers got London costing less than New York. One spreadsheet, three headlines, three sets of regional journalists handed a ready-made story.

The bunq Working Abroad Index is also in its third annual edition, so it is a franchise rather than an opportunistic drop. That makes it better content marketing, not worse.

One correction to the cynical read, though. bunq does lend. It entered the Dutch mortgage market from early 2022, after committing €100 million to home loans, with about two-thirds of that book covered by Dutch state insurance. So bunq carries real residential mortgage exposure. It just carries none of it in Britain, which is the market this index is about.

What to watch next after the bunq Working Abroad Index

None of this makes the bunq Working Abroad numbers wrong. After all, the ONS figure is real and the direction checks out. Southern English cities have been closing on continental capitals for years, driven by UK rent inflation rather than Europe getting cheaper.

Still, read it as a UK rental market story that bunq packaged well. Watch the next ONS private rent index for whether Bristol and Brighton keep closing the gap. Beyond that, expect at least one more neobank to publish a competing city cost ranking before the year is out.

Fintechbits covers neobanks, consumer finance, and fintech marketing. Nothing here constitutes financial or investment advice. All analysis represents the editorial views of Fintechbits.