Cost of Living in Bangkok: What I Actually Spent Per Month

JJ Huang

JJ Huang

— 4 min read
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Cost of Living in Bangkok: What I Actually Spent Per Month

People always ask about the cost of living in Bangkok. The honest answer: it depends on how you live.

We rented in Pinklao, west Bangkok, not deep city centre like Sukhumvit or Silom. It's closer to the Chao Phraya side, with a Talad Indy night market opposite the condo. The unit was tiny around 30+ sqm. One bedroom, one bathroom, one kitchen, one living space. But it was right at the MRT station, which made a real difference day-to-day.

Here's what our living expenses in Bangkok actually looked like.

Rent in Bangkok

11,000-12,000 THB/month.

For direct MRT access and a proper condo, not a converted shophouse, that's fair. You'd pay 50% more for the same unit in Thonglor or Ari.

Food

We mostly ate out. To be honest, cooking at home didn't really make financial sense. Ingredients at Tops or Villa aren't cheap, especially anything imported or fresh. Unless you're buying in bulk from Makro or Lotus, outside food is faster and often cheaper.

The catch: street food portions are small. You end up buying from two or three stalls and it adds up quicker than you'd expect.

My weekday routine:

  • Breakfast: 7-Eleven or street food. Sticky rice and pork, something like that. Around 60 THB. Cheap coffee or Thai tea: 30 THB.
  • Lunch: pad krapao or rad na from wherever's nearby. About 70 THB.
  • Dinner: Talad Indy, a five-minute walk from the condo. One main dish (~65 THB), one side (~50 THB), one juice (~40 THB). Call it 155 THB.

That's around 315 THB per day if you stick to street food and night markets.

Weekends we'd go out properly, sit-down restaurants, sometimes a nicer one. Once per weekend on average. Budget around 600-800 THB per person.

Food: ~9,000-9,500 THB/month

That sounds manageable until you have a week with more restaurant meals or start ordering delivery. It creeps.

Transport

Kwang had a car with company-expensed patrol, which helped a lot on weekends. We'd still top up petrol occasionally ourselves, roughly 2,000 THB every few weeks.

I worked from home, so no daily commute. But I'd Grab to the gym and back on weekdays, about 50 THB each way. MRT and BTS for everything else.

Transport: ~4,000 THB/month

If you're commuting to an office every day, this number goes up significantly.

Fixed Monthly Costs

  • Rent: 11,000-12,000 THB
  • Electricity: ~2,000 THB
  • Gym: 2,500 THB
  • Phone plan: 400 THB
  • Internet: 400 THB
  • Water: 100 THB
  • Netflix + Spotify: ~400 THB

Subtotal: ~16,800-17,800 THB

Electricity was the most annoying variable. Air-con running during the night and fair bit of the day means 2,000 THB is a normal month, and some months it went higher. There's no way around it in Bangkok unless you enjoy sweating through lunch.

Personal Spending

  • Haircut: 200 THB. Cheapo barber right outside the condo. Once a month.
  • Personal care (shampoo, face wash) + occasional clinic: ~1,000-1,500 THB
  • Shopee and random shopping: ~2,000 THB

The Shopee budget was death by a thousand purchases. Nothing expensive individually. But somehow 2,000 THB disappeared every month anyway.

Subtotal: ~3,500 THB

Short Trips

This is where everything swings. We'd do one or two short trips a month, sometimes a road trip to Kanchanaburi, sometimes a flight to Chiang Mai or Phuket.

A typical trip:

  • Hotel: 1,000-2,000 THB/night × 2-3 nights
  • Food: local restaurants most of the time (300-400 THB/person per meal), with one or two nicer meals (700-900 THB/person)
  • Transport: varied a lot

Averaging across road trips and cheap flights, say 7,000-8,000 THB per trip.

Some months we didn't travel at all. Other months we did two back-to-back weekends. Those months looked very different on paper.

Trips: 0-16,000 THB/month, depending.

Total Bangkok Cost of Living

Quiet month, no trips: 36,000-37,000 THB (~S$1,300 / ~$1,000 USD)

Average month with 1-2 trips: 47,000-50,000 THB (~S$1,700 / ~$1,350 USD)

What I'd Cut. What I Wouldn't.

The Shopee habit could go. It's not essential and it's surprisingly easy to rein in if you just stop browsing.

The gym I wouldn't cut. Bangkok heat means outdoor exercise is quite miserable before 7am or after 7pm. Having a proper gym made a real difference to how we felt day-to-day.

Trips are worth it, even the short cheap ones. Bangkok works well as a base precisely because everywhere nearby is reachable on a long weekend.

Is Living in Bangkok Actually Cheap?

For what you get, decent condo, eating out daily, gym membership, short weekend trips, under S$1,500 a month is genuinely good value compared to Singapore.

That said, the cost of living in Thailand isn't dirt cheap if you live with any comfort. The "Bangkok is so affordable" thing is real at the edges, but it doesn't hold up the same way once you add a gym, air-con running all day, and occasional flights.

In hindsight, we lived well within a reasonable budget. We didn't scrimp, but we also didn't splash. That's probably the honest version of Bangkok for most foreigners who actually settle there for a while, not the $600/month dream you read about, but not expensive either.

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