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This surprises me given how god-awful expensive London is. I remember it being one of those cities I've visited where I was like "how do people live here? what do all these people do?"

Or maybe, like New York, you actually can live there fairly reasonably if you really know the place and know how to do it. As a visitor maybe I was paying tourist prices.

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London cost of living isn't so bad.

Public transport is cheap and abundant, competition keeps prices down for restaurants and shops, and there are a lot of free events to keep you busy.

The main expense is in the accomodation, which most people in their 20s combat by sharing houses in undesirable areas. (This is a problem UK wide though as they have managed to keep our housing bubble inflated unlike in the US.)

London is expensive for tourists though. A ride on the Heathrow Express, a few nights in a 3* hotel, and a spin on the London Eye would be enough to make Zuckerberg wince.

Public transport in London is anything but cheap. It is simply the most expensive urban public transport system I know of in terms of cost of monthly passes (or travelcards). Currently a monthly travelcard in zones 1-2 is £116.80 ($177.30). In comparison, a similar monthly pass in New York costs $112, $74 in San Francisco, $167 in Tokyo, $84.50 in Paris, $99.95 in Berlin, $100 in Chicago, $67.96 in Melbourne and so on.

Buses in London are a lot cheaper, it's £1.40 a trip, but the trips can be much longer than the relative speediness of the tube.

The bus is £2.40 now ...

The overwhelming majority of non-season ticket bus fares are paid via Oyster. The cost for paying by Oyster is £1.40

You can also pay for buses using a credit/debit card with contactless payment for £1.40, which is pretty cool (particularly when my Oyster credit runs out) http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tickets/26416.aspx

BTW I work/have worked in other companies in the Forward group, the parent of Forward Labs, and can confirm it really is a great place to work

£116 a month for unlimited travel around the city really pales into insignificance against even the average IT salary.

In many towns and cities outside of London you would need a car to get to work which would cost much more, even without the London uplift in salary.

That's for zones 1-2. If you live in those zones, you probably pay quite a lot for rent. If you live further out, monthly travel cards cost more.

It's not unlimited - just zones 1-2 and the tube shuts down around 12 making it a pain to come back home after a night out.

You can take buses from anywhere, I think you're forgetting. That's still a good deal.

You also get unlimited bus travel through all of London and if you're on a travel card, you can safely travel overground to any station without exit gates without fear of paying extension charges.

When pricing public transport in London, you have to consider the sheer abundance of it. Zone one and two are littered with tube and bus stops, and there are plenty of interconnects. I haven't spent too much time in NY and SF, but their public transport systems seemed very awkward in comparison.

I'm not particularly familiar with most of those cities, but the transportation system in SF is a joke compared to London's.

Not sure what these prices are based on, but in Tokyo a monthly pass for all of a zone doesn't even exist - you'd get a pass for a specific route from station A to station B only, with no buses and so on.

"Tokyo Metro All-Line Pass" http://www.tokyometro.jp/en/ticket/types/pass

That's a good find, but note that the name is a bit misleading: "Tokyo Metro" is only one of many train/subway corporations in Tokyo, so the pass is far more restrictive than the London one. There are a few company-specific passes like this but they're rarely economical since you have to change company to get pretty much anywhere except on your own line.

Yes, and I pay about that much petrol month just in petrol to get to work. London's a swings and roundabouts thing, I can see the attraction TBH.

> London cost of living isn't so bad.

Really? London has the highest rent and house prices in the UK.

The average rental for a 1 bedroom flat is about £1200 a month, if you attribute that to the average UK salary of about £26k that's about 70% of your take home (monthly) pay.

I agree that the other costs are mainly in line with the rest of the country, although the tube is very expensive (buses are much cheaper)

As mentioned, people get around this by house sharing in dodgy areas with a commute on top. This isn't great from quality of life perspective but that's another conversation.

London housrhold incomes (rather than salaries) are much higher than UK average so calculating as a percentage of that £26k is misleading.

A US HR consulting firm called Mercer ranks cities by their cost of living for expats -- what a professional-class resident would expect to pay. They rated London in 2012 at #25 in the world, and more expensive than any US city.

http://www.mercer.com/costoflivingpr#City_rankings

The cost of living is absolutely awful in London.

You'll be fine doing a flat share etc in some of the nicer metropolitan bits, but if you have 3 children like myself, things get expensive awfully quickly.

You have to fish out £1500/month for a 3 bedroom house in a suburban area (zone 5/6) which you won't get stabbed in.

If you want something really nice, say Richmond/Strawberry Hill, try £2250 for the same.

I've been living here for a few years, and the main killer has always been rent. I've been able to get this down by sharing with others, learning about nice but cheaper neighbourhoods (I live in Putney now), and being prepared to commute 30-45 minutes in to central London.

Aside from travel (~£120/month), other costs are similar to elsewhere in the UK. There are decent, well priced (<£10-15 per head) places to eat, drink etc.

A salary in the £20-30k range would require careful money management, but you can live comfortably on £30k+.

I have to agree. I've seen positions advertised via LinkedIn for 20k (GBP, but still!) and I'm not sure how you'd make that work in any big city, let alone London...

I worked in central london for RBI in part of Reed Elsevier and 2 out of 3 of my younger colleagues had access to family property in London which is how they managed to live in London.

Ironically I had a 70 mile commute and I got into work before the ones who lived in London 90% of the time :-)

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