[mickeymounds]

You’re right to sanity-check. Our number is hours of pay needed for a single renter on a new lease, not hours actually worked.

Using your own anchors: if essentials ≈ 70% of median net pay and an effective month is ~140 paid hours (vacation/holidays), then hours = 0.7 × 140 ≈ 98h — nowhere near 200h.

So why would our Nordic rows show >200h? Likely method artifacts:

Rent input: we used current market 1-BR rents (upper bound). Many people have in-place/regulated rents, own, or share, which slashes hours per person.

Hour divisor: some wage series forced monthly ÷ 160–168h instead of ~140 effective hours → inflates the ratio ~10–20%.

Geography mix: capital-city prices vs national wages can overstate costs.

[bauruine]

You have 190 hours for Switzerland. The average full time job here is 42 hours a week at most. 4x42 = 168. Not a single person living here is working 190 hours to cover their basic needs. Sorry but your numbers are complete bullshit. No idea why this is on the front page.

[mickeymounds]

Author here. you’re right to flag Switzerland. Our metric is hours of pay for a single new-lease renter, not hours actually worked. But 190 h for Switzerland still looks too high given official anchors.

Quick back-of-envelope with public data:

Typical pay: Median gross ≈ CHF 6,788/mo (FSO). OECD shows the net take-home for an average single worker is ~82% of gross; using actual hours worked ~1,529/yr ⇒ ~CHF 44 net/hour.

Starter basket (monthly): national rent avg ≈ CHF 1,451 (all dwellings; new leases in Zurich can be ~1,7–2,1k), utilities ~CHF 220, basic groceries ~CHF 500–700, Zurich monthly pass CHF 89. That totals roughly CHF 2.3–2.9k.

Hours of pay needed = basket ÷ net hourly ≈ 50–70 h, not ~190 h. (E.g., CHF 2,600 ÷ CHF 44 ≈ 59 h.)

Using a flat 2,080 h/year to derive hourly pay (instead of actual ~1,529) depresses hourly pay and pushes hours up, which likely inflated our Switzerland row.

Mixing capital-city pricing with national wages can also bias upward.

We’ll correct the Switzerland entry and add a footnote showing the actual-hours denominator we used. Appreciate the nudge.