Cost of living: Italy vs North Carolina

A price backdrop for comparing salaries, not a household budget. How these numbers were derived

The price level for North Carolina is chained, not published directly.

Price levels 2024, checked 10 September 2026Basket: All itemsData checked 26 September 2026

$46,554.93 in North Carolina buys what €30,000 buys in Italy.

On this basket, North Carolina is 55.2% dearer than Italy.

Italy: €30,000
North Carolina: $46,554.93

At the exchange rate that amount would be $34,065 in North Carolina, on 29 September 2026. That figure buys a different basket; the one above buys the same one.

Only the whole basket can be compared between Italy and North Carolina. Eurostat publishes component parities inside Europe, but not for the United States or the United Kingdom, so there is no breakdown to show here rather than an estimated one.

Italy as one price level

Every comparison on this page treats Italy as a single place, because that is how the price data is published. Eurostat produces purchasing power parities for whole countries, and no official annual series breaks them down by region or city. Milan, Rome and a town in Calabria therefore carry the same figure here, even though the gap between them, above all in rents, is one of the widest in western Europe. Read an Italian figure as a national average, adjust upwards for Milan and the large cities of the north and centre, and downwards for much of the south.

When the other side of the comparison is a US state, that side does have its own figure, but it is chained rather than measured. Nobody publishes a price level for Texas in euros. Eurostat publishes one for the United States as a whole, the Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes an index placing each state against the American average, and the state figure is the first scaled by the second. That is the standard construction and it still rests on one assumption more than a comparison between two countries does.

Where Italian prices tend to sit

Italy's overall price level is close to the European Union average: below Germany, France and the Netherlands, above Spain and Portugal. Housing comes out below the average on the national figure, while eating out sits a little above it. Where the other side is another European country, the breakdown table can show those components separately, because Eurostat publishes a parity for each of them. Where the United States or the United Kingdom is involved, only the whole basket is comparable: Eurostat publishes their headline parity but not the component detail, so the table stops at the total instead of estimating the rest.

What an Italian price level leaves out

Health care is the largest item outside the index. In Italy it is provided by the national health service and financed from general taxation, so it is largely absent from the household basket while being a substantial line in an American budget. A price comparison with an American state therefore flatters the American side; the salary comparison for the same two places, which runs both sides through their own payroll rules, is the fuller picture.

The other gap is the rental market in the places people move to. The index reflects the whole housing stock, in a country where most households own their home, so it moves slowly. Someone signing a first lease in Milan, or in the centre of Rome, Florence or Bologna, faces a price level well above the national figure shown here.

Currency, and why it is not in the answer

The equivalence on this page does not use an exchange rate. A purchasing power parity is a price in each country's own currency for the same basket, so the ratio between two of them is a ratio of prices and does not move when the euro does. Against another euro country the exchange rate is one to one and the whole difference is prices. Against the dollar or the pound, the market rate appears only as a dated contrast line, showing what a bank would give you for the same sum, which is a different and usually much less useful number for anyone deciding where to live.

Sources

Tax figures come from the official rules of each tax year. Price levels come from the statistical offices, for the reference year shown above.

How these numbers were derived

Purchasing power parities describe an average household basket for a whole state or country, not your rent.

na_item=PPP_EU27_2020 for ppp_cat A01, A0101, A0103, A0104, A0107 and A0111 at the most recent year the series carries, read from the Eurostat dissemination API. Values are the parity in national currency per PPS, so a ratio between two of them is free of market exchange rates. Not the price level index: that has the reference year's exchange rate built in.

Line codes 1 to 5 of table SARPP for the most recent year in the file, read from apps.bea.gov/regional/zip/SARPP.zip. Values are indices with the United States at 100. A state parity in national currency is derived as the United States parity multiplied by the state index and divided by 100. That is a linking step between two official series, not a single measurement.

The published data has no price level of its own for North Carolina. Its figure is the United States parity scaled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis price parity for the state, which is a linking step between two official series rather than a single measurement.