The cost of living in Ghana

Why the comparison sites get Ghana wrong

Ghana is inexpensive if you live the way most Ghanaians live and expensive if you live the way most visitors expect to. That single sentence explains why online cost-of-living calculators produce numbers that bear no relation to what diaspora families actually spend here.

Those tools work by averaging prices for a basket of goods. The basket is the problem. It assumes you pay rent monthly, which most tenants here do not. It assumes mains electricity works without a backup, which serious households do not assume. It treats a bag of tomatoes at a market and a jar of pasta sauce in a supermarket as substitutes, when one is grown twenty miles away and the other crossed an ocean and paid duty on arrival.

The other distortion is the split economy. Two families on the same street can have monthly outgoings that differ by an order of magnitude, depending on whether the children are in an international school or a local one, whether there is a generator, whether food comes from Makola or from a supermarket in East Legon, and whether anyone runs a car.

So this article does not give you figures. Prices and the exchange rate move, and a number printed here would be wrong within months. It gives you the structure of the cost — the decisions that actually set your monthly number — and tells you where to get the real prices for the life you intend to live.

Rent, and the advance that changes everything

Housing is the largest single cost for most households and the most important structural difference from renting abroad, because Ghanaian landlords commonly ask for a long period of rent in advance rather than month by month. One or two years at once is a familiar request, particularly for the kind of property a returning family wants.

That practice reshapes the whole exercise. A monthly budget is not enough; you need the lump sum available before you sign, and it goes out of your hands entirely at the start. It is negotiable in principle and less so in practice, and the shorter the advance you ask for, the higher the monthly equivalent will usually be.

What drives the price of a house here is location, security arrangements and whether it is finished to a standard a foreign tenant expects. A gated estate in Cantonments or Airport Residential with proper fittings, borehole water and a generator sits in a different market from an unfurnished house on the outskirts. Serviced flats aimed at expatriates are a different market again, usually priced in dollars.

Get everything in a written tenancy agreement, confirm that the person letting to you actually owns or is authorised to let the property, and use a lawyer for anything long. The rent advance is real money handed to someone on the strength of a document, and a bad document is how people lose it.

Power, water and the cost of backup

Utilities in Ghana cost less than in Europe and come with an infrastructure bill that Europe does not have. Most homes run on prepaid electricity meters, so you buy credit and watch it go down, which at least makes consumption visible in a way a quarterly bill never does.

Air conditioning is what moves the number. A household that cools two bedrooms overnight through the hot months will spend substantially more on electricity than one that uses fans, and that is a lifestyle decision rather than a price. Electric water heaters, freezers and pumps do the rest of the work.

Then there is backup. If you want continuity through an outage you pay for it once as equipment — an inverter and battery bank, or a generator — and then monthly in fuel and maintenance. Generator fuel is a recurring household cost that no comparison site includes, and diesel or petrol prices move with the exchange rate and with the world oil market.

Water is the quiet one. Mains supply is intermittent in many areas, so houses store water in a poly tank and top it up, and some rely on a borehole or on tanker deliveries. Tanker water is bought by the load and its cost varies with where you are and how dry the season is. When you view a house, ask how it gets its water and what happens in March, not just whether the tap runs today.

Food: two shops, two economies

Food is where Ghana is genuinely cheap, provided you buy what grows here and buy it where Ghanaians buy it. Yam, plantain, cassava, tomatoes, garden eggs, onions, peppers, local rice, groundnuts, fresh fish on the coast and chicken from a local supplier are all inexpensive at a market, and they are the basis of most of what people actually eat.

Markets are the cheap option and they cost you time. Makola in central Accra, Kejetia in Kumasi, Kaneshie, Madina and the market at Kasoa on the main road all work the same way: you go early, you haggle, you carry it home, and you do it two or three times a week because there is no point buying tomatoes for Friday on a Monday. Prices move with the season and with the rains.

Supermarkets are the expensive option and they sell a different thing. Cheese, breakfast cereal, olive oil, wine, nappies, branded cleaning products and anything else that arrived in a container has paid freight and duty, and it is priced accordingly. A family that reproduces a European shopping list in Accra will spend more on food than they did in Europe. A family that eats Ghanaian food will spend far less.

Most returning households land somewhere in between, buying staples at the market and accepting that a few imported comforts cost what they cost.

Transport, fuel and whether to own a car

Getting around costs very little if you use shared transport and a great deal if you run a car, and that is one of the bigger forks in a household budget. Trotros — the shared minibuses that run fixed routes with a mate calling the destination — are the cheapest way to move and the way most of the country travels.

Shared taxis run set routes for a set fare, dropping taxis take you where you ask for a negotiated price, and ride-hailing apps operate in Accra and Kumasi with metered pricing that removes the argument. For a returning family, ride-hailing usually replaces car ownership for the first few months while they work out how much they actually need to drive.

Owning a car brings fuel, insurance, roadworthiness, licensing and maintenance, and fuel is the line that moves, because pump prices here respond to both the world oil price and the cedi. Roads punish vehicles: potholes after heavy rain, speed humps on residential streets, unsurfaced side roads and dust. Budget for suspension work and tyres more often than you would abroad, and choose a common model so that parts exist in Abossey Okai and any mechanic knows the engine.

Traffic has a cost too, in hours. The Kasoa road and the main arteries into Accra back up badly at peak times, and a job or a school on the wrong side of the city will cost you two hours a day for years. Weigh that as carefully as the rent.

Eating out, from a roadside pot to a hotel dining room

Eating out in Ghana spans a wider range than in almost any Western country, from a bowl of waakye at a roadside stand to a restaurant in Airport Residential priced for an international clientele. Both are eating out, and they belong to different budgets entirely.

The everyday end is chop bars and street food, and it is excellent. Waakye in the morning with shito, gari and an egg. Banku and tilapia with pepper. Fufu and light soup. Red red with fried plantain. Kenkey with fish. Jollof from a pot that has been going since dawn. These are cooked for people who eat them every day, and a working Ghanaian can eat well for a small fraction of what a hotel breakfast costs.

The middle is the neighbourhood restaurant and the chicken-and-chips spot, and the top is the hotel dining room and the handful of fine-dining places in Accra, where a meal costs what it would cost in a European capital. Nothing is hidden here; the range is visible and you choose where in it you live.

Alcohol is worth mentioning separately because it distorts budgets quietly. Local beer and local spirits are inexpensive; imported wine and spirits carry duty and are not. A household that drinks imported wine regularly will feel it.

School fees, which decide many family budgets

For families with children, school fees are frequently the largest single line in the budget, larger than rent, and the range between the options is enormous. Ghana has public schools, a wide spread of private Ghanaian schools, and international schools following British, American or International Baccalaureate curricula.

International schools in Accra are priced in a global market and quoted per term, often in dollars, and they are the reason a diaspora family’s costs can look nothing like their neighbours’. Private Ghanaian schools with good reputations cost a great deal less and educate a great many of the country’s professionals. Public schools cost least and vary widely by school and by region.

The fees themselves are not the whole cost. Admission and registration charges, uniforms, books, transport, examination entries, and the extras that appear each term all add up, and boarding at senior high school brings its own list of provisions. Ask any school for a full written schedule of everything payable across a year, not just the tuition, and ask about how often fees are reviewed.

The other question is curriculum continuity. A child who may return to the United Kingdom for sixth form has different needs from one who will sit the West African examinations and go to university here. Decide that first, because it narrows the school list far more sharply than price does.

Health cover and what it actually pays for

Routine healthcare in Ghana costs much less than in Europe or North America, and the serious risk is not the everyday consultation but the emergency that needs a facility or a specialist the nearest hospital does not have. Budget for the second, not the first.

The National Health Insurance Scheme is the public cover, it is linked to the Ghana Card, and it is worth registering for. It covers a defined set of services at accredited facilities, and it does not cover everything; people who rely on it alone still pay out of pocket for items outside the benefit package.

Private cover sits on top. There are Ghanaian private health insurers and corporate schemes, and there is international health insurance bought abroad, which costs considerably more and typically includes the thing that matters most: medical evacuation. For a retiree or a family with an existing condition, evacuation cover is the line item that justifies the policy, because the alternative is finding tens of thousands of pounds at the worst moment of your life.

Practical costs to expect are consultations at a private clinic, laboratory tests, imaging and medicines, most of which are paid at the point of use and are inexpensive by Western standards. Imported branded medicines cost more than local generics. Anyone considering a long-term move should read our piece on retiring in Ghana, where the health question is the deciding factor more often than money is.

Household help, security and the social cost

Domestic help, drivers and security are affordable in Ghana relative to Western wages, and a great many middle-class households employ someone. That affordability is genuine, and it comes with obligations that people from abroad frequently overlook.

A house help, a cook, a gardener, a driver, a night watchman — these are jobs, and they sit under Ghana’s Labour Act. Pay a proper wage rather than a favour, agree hours and duties in writing, and be clear about leave. Employers should register employees with SSNIT and remit contributions. The cheap thing to do here is also the thing that creates a dispute, and disputes with someone who has keys to your house are worth avoiding on their own terms.

Security is a separate line: an estate service charge covering a manned gate, or a private guard on your own compound, or both. What you need depends entirely on where you live, and the honest way to work it out is to ask the neighbours rather than to guess from abroad.

There is also an unbudgeted social cost that every returning Ghanaian recognises. Family obligations, funerals, school fees for relatives, church or mosque contributions, and the assumption that someone who came back from abroad can help. This is real money and it is not optional in any way that matters. Decide in advance what you can do, be consistent, and say so plainly rather than being worn down.

Phone, data and the small recurring costs

Mobile and internet costs in Ghana are low by Western standards, and almost everyone treats them as a monthly bundle rather than a contract. Data bundles from MTN, Telecel or AirtelTigo are bought in blocks, and most households run at least two networks because coverage and reliability differ from street to street.

Home broadband, where fibre or fixed wireless reaches your address, is a separate monthly cost and worth having for anyone working from home or streaming. Availability is street by street, so the question for any house is whether that building is already connected rather than whether the neighbourhood has service.

Then there are the small recurring items that add up quietly: mobile money transaction charges, which apply to the way most of the country moves money; satellite or streaming television subscriptions, which are priced in a way that reflects imported content; gas cylinders for cooking, refilled rather than metered; and the regular top-up of a water tank or a generator.

None of these individually changes a budget. Collectively they are the difference between the figure you planned and the figure you spend, which is why the only useful budget is one built from your own actual life rather than from a list of averages. Our guide to money in Ghana, the cedi and mobile money covers how payments work and what each channel charges you for.

The cedi, inflation and where your money sits

The currency question matters more than any individual price, because the cedi has a long record of losing value against the dollar, the pound and the euro. If your income is in a foreign currency, that movement works in your favour over time. If your income is in cedis, it does not.

This shapes practical decisions. Large costs quoted in dollars — international school fees, serviced apartments, some rents aimed at expatriates — do not get cheaper as the cedi weakens; they get more expensive in local terms, which is precisely why they are quoted that way. Costs that are genuinely local, such as market food, local transport and domestic wages, respond to domestic inflation instead, which has its own history here.

Holding money is therefore a decision rather than a default. Keeping a year of rent in cedis in a current account for a year is a choice with a cost. So is holding everything abroad and transferring at the wrong moment. Talk to a Ghanaian bank about what foreign currency accounts are available to you and on what terms, and understand how you will move money in before you need to move it.

Price your life in the currency you earn, then check it again in the currency you spend.

Review the budget annually. A number that worked two years ago may simply no longer describe the same life.

Who finds Ghana cheap, and who does not

Ghana is cheap for someone with a foreign income who is willing to live locally, and expensive for someone trying to reproduce a Western suburban life with imported everything. Most people fall between the two, and where you fall is decided by four choices rather than by the country.

Those choices are the house, the school, the car and the food. A family in a modest house on the Kasoa or Spintex side, with children in a good private Ghanaian school, one shared car and a market-based kitchen, lives well on a fraction of what the same family spends in a gated estate in Cantonments with two international school places, two vehicles and a supermarket trolley full of imports. Neither family is doing anything wrong. They are simply answering the four questions differently.

The people for whom Ghana is genuinely inexpensive are retirees with pensions from abroad, remote workers earning in hard currency, and returnees who already own a house here. The people who find it expensive are those on Ghanaian salaries competing for the same housing, and newcomers who arrive without a plan and pay a stranger’s price for everything in the first year.

If you are costing a visit rather than a move, our breakdown of what a trip to Ghana costs approaches the same question from the traveller’s side, where the variables are different and the timescales are shorter.

How we help you price a move or a long stay

The most reliable way to cost a life in Ghana is to spend a few weeks living it, and that is the part we handle. Ghana Travel & Tour arranges flights and hotels, airport pickup at Kotoka, a car with a driver for house viewings and school visits, and fully furnished 3, 4 and 5-bedroom homes in Kasoa Opeikuma for stays long enough to shop at the market and pay for your own fuel.

Our Ghana travel guide covers the practical ground before you arrive. Quotes are itemised, given in GHS, USD, GBP or EUR, and handled by one named trip manager.

Questions people ask