VISUALIZED: What a decent life in Prague actually costs you

Not everyone agrees that the number means what it claims to. Others see it as a gap between what normal life costs and what most wages cover.

Expats.cz Staff

Written by Expats.cz Staff Published on 04.05.2026 15:56:00 (updated on 04.05.2026) Reading time: 1 minute

Business & Money
Collage credits: Shutterstock
Collage credits: Shutterstock

A vacation once a year. A small amount set aside each month. These are not luxuries they are the baseline of what researchers call a decent wage: enough not just to survive, but to live.

Every year, an independent panel of economists, sociologists, and social scientists calculates what that baseline actually costs. In 2024, for a full-time worker supporting one child, it came to CZK 48,336 gross a month, rising to CZK 56,912 in Prague and Brno, where rents run significantly higher.

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A decent life in Czechia costs CZK 48,336 a month. Here's where it goes

Not everyone agrees that the number means what it claims to. Critics argue the methodology works backwards, calculating an ideal income from idealized spending, rather than reflecting how people actually manage money.

Štěpán Křeček, an economist and adviser to the prime minister, has called it a controversial concept that doesn't align with how people make real economic decisions.

The platform's authors would say that the figure isn't a forecast of what people earn. It's a measure of the gap between what a normal life costs and what most wages actually cover.

Czechia's national minimum wage last year was CZK 20,800, less than half. Here are the numbers, visualized.

Infographic: Daria Ostapenko
Infographic: expats.cz
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