11 Nov The Cost of Living in Chiang Mai

We love living in Chiang Mai. Every day we wake up in the most luxurious apartment we’ve ever rented and get to swim for free in our outdoor pool. We can eat out at one of our favourite restaurants, meet up for dinner with friends or have a massage whenever we like. We’re pretty much living a dream lifestyle, but for what price? Find out in our cost of living in Chiang Mai breakdown.

Cost of living Chiang Mai, our monthly breakdown

We’re going to take you through a detailed breakdown of how much we spend living in Chiang Mai per month. Before I start though, here are a few things to take into consideration:

• All the prices listed are for two people.
• We don’t eat meat, so that reduces our food costs slightly.
• The costs below are for the full month of October 2016.
• We barely ever drink alcohol and even less frequently buy soft drinks.
• We pay for everything in Thai Bhat (THB).
• We’re using the exchange rates listed for the 6^th November 2016.
• You can read about how much we spent living in Chiang Mai for a month back in 2013 in this post.

The cost of rent and bills in Chiang Mai

Our Chiang Mai Apartment is spacious, comfortable, has a washing machine, western kitchen, free pool and great view of the mountains. It’s at the higher end of the price scale for Chiang Mai, but we don’t mind because we love the apartment and spend so much time at home working. Our bills are crazily cheap compared to western standards. We pay our electricity bill at the local 7/11, our water money to the building manager and our internet bill at the Sinet branch in Maya Mall, just down the road.

Prices for food and household items in Chiang Mai

We love having a kitchen and cook most of our meals at home. Our groceries, household items and toiletries mostly come from Rimping supermarket in Maya Mall, but we’ve also shopped at the Big C Extra, Tesco, Topps and local markets. We eat out once or twice a week at one of our favourite Chiang Mai restaurants and also occasionally order meals to be delivered through Food Panda. Our apartment building orders crates of drinking water which we buy for 50 THB per 20 litres. When we’ve finished, the bottles are returned and reused.

Cost of transportation in Chiang Mai

We love living in the Nimman area of Chiang Mai, which is in the north-west, on the outskirts of the city. There’s everything we need here, including Maya Mall, some of our favourite restaurants and the best massage place we’ve found in Chiang Mai. We mostly hang out here but when we do go into the Old City area we take a local red songthaew, which costs just 20 THB per person, per ride.

Cost of living in Chiang Mai: entertainment

Unless we go away for the day or weekend, our daily entertainment in Chiang Mai consists of swimming in the pool at our apartment, exploring the city on foot, visiting temples and getting massages. These activities are all either free or very cheap; a one-hour foot massage at our favourite local spa costs 250 THB each and we may have to pay the odd 50 THB for temple entrance fees. There’s also a cinema at Maya Mall which we’ve yet to visit, but tickets are just a couple of pounds each.

The basic monthly cost of living in Chiang Mai

So, here are our total basic Chiang Mai living costs for October, including food, transport, accommodation, bills and entertainment. This price represents a typical month in Chiang Mai for us and we live extremely happily and comfortably here. It is possible to spend a lot less per month if you rent a less luxurious apartment and eat Thai food every day. Our friends Darren and Shelley from Finding Beyond, for example, eat lunch and dinner at local street stalls and Thai restaurants everyday for £138 per month.

So, that gives you an idea of what you can live on comfortably in Chiang Mai, but what if you want to explore Thailand on weekend trips? As an example, in October we went on a weekend visit to Mae Salong, here’s how much it cost us.

Our Weekend away to Mae Salong

For this trip we rented a car online from SIXT for three days which allowed us to explore independently, stopping off in Chiang Rai and tea plantations along the way. We drove 350 miles and spent just £20 in fuel. We booked two nights at a hotel with beautiful views in Mae Salong; the price included breakfast so we thought it was good value for money.

 Here are some further examples of the prices you can expect to pay when you live in Chiang Mai:

• We pay 325 THB for a delicious pizza meal cooked in a wood-fired oven from Why Not? Restaurant.
• Street food in Chiang Mai costs as little as 20 – 50 THB per dish.
• We got a haircut at a western salon in Nimman called New York, New York for 600 THB each. This included a wash and scalp massage, cut and blow dry.
• Renting a motorbike for the day to go to the Sticky Waterfalls in September cost us 250 THB plus 85 THB in fuel.
• A tea or coffee at a café in Chiang Mai costs between 50 and 100 THB.
• You can take a Tuk Tuk ride in the city for between 100 – 200 THB, depending on the distance.
• Clothes from a market in Chiang Mai can cost a few hundred THB.

Our complete living in Chiang Mai costs for October

So, if you add the cost of our Mae Salong weekend trip to our basic living costs for the month, here’s what our total cost of living in Chiang Mai for October looks like.

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What do you think of our Chiang Mai living cost breakdown?