What living in China costs, per person, from official data
China's household survey puts per-person spending at 29,476 yuan in 2025: the eight categories, the urban-rural gap, four provinces, and what it misses.
Living page — numbers read from the sources on 2026-11-11, re-checked quarterly.
Most “cost of living in China” figures in circulation are somebody’s basket of prices, collected by a company and updated on its own schedule. China also publishes an official number for what households spend, from a survey that covers 160,000 households and is weighted to represent the resident population. It answers a different question, and every part of it can be checked against the release.
The 2025 figure is 29,476 yuan per person. Below are the eight spending categories, the urban and rural split, four provinces that bracket the national range, the same numbers in dollars at a dated exchange rate, and the four things this number does not tell you.
The official figure for 2025 is 29,476 yuan per person
China’s national per capita consumption expenditure was 29,476 yuan in 2025, up 4.4% in nominal terms and 4.4% after price factors. The figure is from the NBS release of 2026-01-19 (Chinese, English edition, both read 2026-11-11).
That figure is an average over a sample of 160,000 households, weighted by the number of households each sample represents, and it covers permanent residents in both cities and villages. Urban residents spent 35,869 yuan per person and rural residents 20,259 yuan, so the urban figure is 1.77 times the rural one.
The same release a year later shows the pace slowing. For the first three quarters of 2026 the per-person figure was 22,354 yuan, up 3.6% in nominal terms and 2.7% after prices (NBS release, 2026-10-19, Chinese; English edition, read 2026-11-11). Over the same three quarters of 2025 the real increase was 4.7% (NBS release, 2025-10-22, read 2026-11-11), so the real growth rate roughly halved between the two periods.
| Group, 2025 calendar year | Per person | Nominal growth | In USD at 6.7167 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nationwide | 29,476 yuan | +4.4% | $4,389 |
| Urban residents | 35,869 yuan | +3.8% | $5,340 |
| Rural residents | 20,259 yuan | +5.1% | $3,016 |
| Nationwide, first three quarters of 2026 | 22,354 yuan | +3.6% | $3,328 |
The last row covers nine months, not a year, and is not annualised anywhere in the release.
Food and housing take just over half of the average budget
Food, tobacco and liquor was the largest category in 2025 at 8,631 yuan per person, 29.3% of the total; residence was second at 6,397 yuan, 21.7%. Both shares come from the NBS release of 2026-01-19 (link, read 2026-11-11).
| Category | 2025, yuan | Share of 2025 total | First three quarters of 2026, yuan | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Food, tobacco and liquor | 8,631 | 29.3% | 6,643 | 29.7% |
| Residence | 6,397 | 21.7% | 4,753 | 21.3% |
| Transportation and telecommunication | 4,306 | 14.6% | 3,190 | 14.3% |
| Education, culture and recreation | 3,489 | 11.8% | 2,647 | 11.8% |
| Health care and medical services | 2,573 | 8.7% | 1,974 | 8.8% |
| Household facilities, articles and services | 1,667 | 5.7% | 1,281 | 5.7% |
| Clothing | 1,554 | 5.3% | 1,172 | 5.2% |
| Miscellaneous goods and services | 859 | 2.9% | 694 | 3.1% |
The two columns are nine months apart in coverage but nearly identical in shape: no category moved by more than half a percentage point of the total. The food share is the Engel coefficient that news reports quote for provinces, and it is the one number here that people compare across countries without adjusting for the fact that the other country’s survey measures a different basket.
Four provinces bracket the national figure by a factor of 2.4
Shanghai’s per-person spending was 54,765 yuan in 2025, the highest of the four areas checked here, and Henan’s was 22,850 yuan, a 2.4-fold spread inside one country. Each figure comes from that area’s own release: Shanghai statistics bureau (2026-01-21), Zhejiang statistical communiqué (2026-03), Sichuan statistical communiqué (2026-03-17) and Henan statistical communiqué (2026-04-09), all read 2026-11-11.
| Province-level area, 2025 | All residents | Urban residents | Rural residents | Growth, all residents |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shanghai | 54,765 yuan | 57,076 yuan | 33,891 yuan | +3.9% |
| Zhejiang | 47,551 yuan | 53,223 yuan | 35,078 yuan | +5.4% |
| Sichuan | 26,073 yuan | 32,181 yuan | 19,818 yuan | +4.8% |
| Henan | 22,850 yuan | 27,319 yuan | 18,401 yuan | +4.1% |
| China, national figure | 29,476 yuan | 35,869 yuan | 20,259 yuan | +4.4% |
The urban-rural gap inside a province is often wider than the gap between provinces: Henan’s urban residents spent 1.48 times its rural residents, and Sichuan’s ratio is 1.62.
In dollars, the national average is about $366 a month
The dollar column above uses the central parity rate published for 2026-11-10, which set one US dollar at 6.7167 yuan (PBOC / CFETS announcement, 2026-11-10, read 2026-11-11). At that rate the national figure is $4,389 a year, about $366 a month and $12 a day per person.
The conversion has one honest use and one dishonest one. It is useful for sizing a budget in a currency the reader holds. It is not a price-level comparison: the same yuan buys different amounts in Shanghai and in a county in the interior, and the market rate does not correct for that. A purchasing-power comparison needs a different conversion factor, which is not in any of these releases.
The survey counts things a price check does not
The household survey counts cash spending and in-kind consumption, and it imputes a rent for owner-occupied homes. The definitions are in the indicator explanations of the China Statistical Yearbook, household survey section (read 2026-11-11). Three consequences matter when the number gets quoted as a living cost.
Residence spending includes an imputed rent for owner-occupied housing, alongside actual rent, water, electricity, fuel and property management. A household that owns its flat therefore reports housing consumption rather than zero, which makes the residence line closer to a market rent than a mortgage payment would suggest.
The unit is a person, not a household. The survey publishes per-capita figures, calculated as the total for the surveyed households divided by the population, counting residents with no income as well (Shanghai statistics bureau data page, 2026-01-21, read 2026-11-11). Multiplying 29,476 by four to price a family of four assumes a household consumes four times what a single person does, which the release does not claim.
The base is permanent residence, not household registration. People who have moved to a city and registered elsewhere are counted where they live, which is why the national figure sits between the urban and rural ones rather than at either.
The share of income that gets spent varies by 13 points across these provinces
Dividing spending by disposable income gives 72.2% for Sichuan and 59.5% for Shanghai, a 13-point range across the same five figures. The ratios are my arithmetic on the per-person figures in the releases above: Zhejiang 67.7%, nationwide 68.0%, Henan 68.8%, with both sides taken from the same survey. A province with a low spending number is partly a province with a low income, so the spending figure alone does not separate prices from pay.
How I checked
Each figure comes from the releasing body’s own page, read on 2026-11-11, with the URL in the sentence. The national and quarterly totals were taken from the National Bureau of Statistics releases, the four province-level figures from that area’s statistics bureau, and the exchange rate from the central parity announcement for a single dated day.
I recomputed the derived numbers rather than copying them from news coverage: the eight category shares for 2025 and for the first three quarters of 2026, the urban-to-rural ratio, the spend-to-income ratios, and every dollar figure at the 6.7167 rate. Both category tables sum exactly to their published totals, 29,476 yuan and 22,354 yuan. The national release also exists in an English edition, which I read alongside the Chinese for the wording of each category name.
What I could not check
- Any comparison with the United States or India. The BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey pages and India’s MoSPI site were not reachable from this machine on 2026-11-11: the US pages answered 403 to a non-browser request and the Indian site did not resolve. Those surveys also count different units (a consumer unit per year, a person per month), so lining them up against this figure needs work I could not do here.
- A purchasing-power conversion factor. No primary series was reachable, so the dollar figures above are market-rate only and do not support a price-level comparison.
- Household-level totals. The releases publish per-person figures; the underlying household totals are not in the public tables, so I could not test how spending scales with household size.
- The full year 2026. Only the first three quarters are published; the annual release for 2026 would be due in early 2027.
- Whether the yearbook definition I quote is unchanged word for word. The indicator explanation on the NBS site carries an older yearbook’s URL; the substance matches what the current releases count, but I could not open the newest edition’s equivalent page to compare it line by line.