How the Gera EU Value Index is calculated

The formula

The Gera EU Value Index (GEVI) measures how far a country’s take-home salary stretches against its local cost of living, anchored so the EU average is roughly 100. For each country:

GEVI = (netEur / €24,686) ÷ (GECI / 100) × 100

where netEur is the country’s net annual earnings and €24,686 is the EU-27 simple mean of those earnings, and GECI is the Gera EU Cost Index. A GEVI above 100 means a salary buys more than the EU norm relative to local prices; below 100, less. The EU median GEVI is 94.9.

The real inputs

• Net annual earnings (take-home pay) — Eurostat earn_nt_net, for a single person with no children at 100% of the national average wage, 2024. This is Eurostat’s standard comparable take-home figure. We use it in EUR for the salary term and also publish it in Purchasing Power Standard (PPS) as an independent cross-check (EU mean PPS = €23,982).
• Cost of living — the Gera EU Cost Index, itself built from Eurostat price level indices (prc_ppp_ind, household final consumption, 2024) and household electricity and gas prices (nrg_pc_204 / nrg_pc_202, 2025-S2), all taxes included.
• Local currency — for the 7 non-euro EU members, EUR figures are also shown in the national currency using ECB euro reference rates of 19 June 2026 (the Bulgarian lev at its fixed ERM II peg, 1.95583). These conversions are display-only and do not enter the index.

Purpose rankings (best country for…)

Each purpose re-ranks the same real figures with a different, published weighting of three normalised sub-scores, all derived from the data above: valueScore = GEVI ÷ median × 50; salaryScore = PPS earnings index ÷ 100 × 50; affordScore = (200 − cost index) ÷ 2. The weights below are the only Gera-defined inputs — every underlying number is a real Eurostat figure.

What we never do

Every input is a real, published Eurostat figure. Nothing is modelled, estimated or interpolated. Where Eurostat publishes no value, none is invented. The index is fully reproducible from the sources cited on this page, and is re-dated when Eurostat releases new earnings or price-level data (annually).