This page used to compare the cost of living in Guyana with that of Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Peru. It no longer does, and the reason is worth stating plainly: we hold measured figures for Guyana and we hold none for those countries. Setting a Guyanese rent read from twenty newspaper-style listings beside a figure nobody measured for Lima is not a comparison. It is a suggestion dressed as one. What follows is what is published about Guyana itself, each figure with the source that published it, the date it was read or surveyed, and the sample it rests on.
Why this page no longer compares Guyana with its neighbors
A comparison needs the same measurement, taken the same way, in each country. Look at what our Guyanese figures are actually made of and you can see why there is no comparison on equal terms available here:
- Rents are asking prices from one agency's listings, read on a single day.
- Market food prices come from a government market survey that has stopped.
- Electricity is a regulated tariff in force since 2021.
- Internet is a regulator-approved price list from 2026.
- School fees come from a United States government fact sheet about one school.
- Health spending is a World Bank national average for 2023.
Six methods, six dates, one country. Even inside Guyana these figures cannot be added up into a single cost of living. Across borders they would be meaningless, and a reader planning a move on them would be planning on nothing. One indicator in this list is built for international comparison, and we say so in its own section below.
Rent: asking prices from one agency, 20 listings, one region
From 20 residential rentals advertised by Century 21 Guyana, read on 11 October 2026, with asking rents ranging from USD 574 to USD 3,500 a month:
- 25th percentile: USD 1,500 per month
- Median: USD 2,000 per month
- 75th percentile: USD 2,500 per month
Read those three as the lower quarter, the middle and the upper quarter of one agency's advertised asking prices, not as market tiers and not as what anyone paid. Three limits travel with them. They are all in Demerara-Mahaica, the region that contains Georgetown, so there is no breakdown below region level. Twenty listings is a small sample; the equivalent Suriname figures on this platform rest on 417. And no listing carried a posting date, so the date above is the day the listings were read.
What came out. The earlier draft put a decent Georgetown apartment at roughly USD 278 to USD 465 a month. The cheapest listing we could read was USD 574, and the middle of the set was more than four times the top of that range. We have no source for the old figure and it is gone.
And a sentence that is not coming back. The draft named two Georgetown streets as the ones with amenities where expatriates live. We have no measurement that supports ranking neighborhoods, and that kind of sentence lands on real streets and the people living on them. Instead: ask to see the property at the hour you would be home, ask the landlord for the last twelve months of utility bills, ask what the water pressure and the supply reliability are like, and ask your employer to put any housing allowance in the contract.
Food and fuel: a market survey that stopped, and a price that disagrees with itself
Guyana's Ministry of Agriculture published Prevailing Retail Prices from Guyana Marketing Corporation data. From the survey of 26 June 2025, taking the median across the markets that actually printed a price:
- Chicken (local): GYD 520 per pound, the median of the 10 of 11 markets that reported it, range 440 to 700.
- Tomatoes: GYD 700 per pound, the median of 11 of 11 markets, range 550 to 1,000.
Those are our own medians of the markets the table prints, not the publication's own Average column. The reason is in the document: its stated Minimum and Maximum do not match the markets it shows, so those columns draw on markets the table does not print. The series has stopped. This is the newest of 113 editions and the Ministry has published none since, so the figures are more than a year old and fresh produce moves. They are here because the alternative is an invented number, not because they are current.
For fuel, GUYOIL publishes GYD 258 per liter of gasoline as the retail price at its Demerara (Providence) terminal, with the wholesale price on the same line at 248.00; the date is the page's own last-modified stamp of 28 September 2026, since GUYOIL states no effective date. One caution we will not hide: independent trackers put Guyana's national pump price near GYD 228 per liter in the same month. That may be a different grade, a terminal price rather than a forecourt price, or a different date. It is unresolved, and we record it rather than pick a side.
The draft's claim that basic groceries run to about 5,000 GYD has no source behind it and is out. So is the comparison that followed it.
Electricity and internet: two regulated tariffs, five years apart
Guyana Power and Light publishes its tariff structure. For the residential class above 75 kWh a month:
- GYD 43.43 per kWh
- plus a standing charge of GYD 351.04 a month, billed whether or not any power is used
Those rates have been in force since 11 April 2021. That is not an oversight on our side: the Public Utilities Commission's six published orders on GPL between 2021 and 2026 are all annual reviews of operating standards and performance targets, and none of them changes a tariff. One honest wrinkle: GPL's site does not state a currency anywhere. It is Guyana dollars, corroborated against the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Snapshot for Guyana, which puts residential power at about USD 0.20 per kWh, and the CCREEE Energy Report Card for Guyana, which gives USD 0.19 to 0.28 per kWh across the same twelve classes.
Internet is the one figure here with a recent date. From the Public Utilities Commission's Approved Telecommunications Rates, published 3 July 2026: the cheapest fiber plan the regulator lists is GYD 8,399 a month at 20 Mbps, the cheapest plan at or above 300 Mbps is GYD 11,399, and the fastest listed, at 1000 Mbps, is GYD 20,399. These are approved rates for one operator's plans, which is what the regulator publishes; they are not a survey of what households pay.
Schooling and healthcare: one top-tier figure and one national average
For an international school, the readable figures come from the U.S. Department of State's Office of Overseas Schools fact sheet for Georgetown International Academy, dated April 2026, per child per year:
- PreK USD 8,000
- Elementary USD 23,300
- Middle school USD 28,500
- High school USD 28,500
Third-hand, and still the better source: the school's own site returns an empty page and the other international school in Georgetown publishes no fees at all. The fact sheet carries the amounts, says the school provided them, and is reissued each year at the same address, so the figure can be read again and seen to have changed. Read it as the top tier, not the average — an American-curriculum school is what a posted family chooses, and public education costs a fraction of it. The earlier draft put annual international-school tuition at roughly USD 465 to USD 1,394. That is wrong by a factor of tens, and it is out.
For healthcare we have national averages and nothing closer. World Bank indicators, most recent non-empty value, 2023:
- Current health expenditure per capita: USD 505.03 a year (SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD)
- Domestic general government health expenditure per capita: USD 354.25 (SH.XPD.GHED.PC.CD)
- Out-of-pocket expenditure per capita: USD 132.96 (SH.XPD.OOPC.PC.CD)
- Current health expenditure: 2.47 per cent of GDP (SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS)
This is the one place you can run the comparison yourself, and it is the reason the indicator codes are printed above rather than tidied away. The World Bank publishes each of those indicators for every country on the same basis, so you can open the same page and read Brazil, Chile, Colombia or Peru against Guyana without trusting our arithmetic or anyone else's. What you cannot get from it is a private consultation fee. These are averages across a whole population, including public care; the draft's figure of about USD 70 for a typical private consultation has no published source and is gone. Ask the clinic for its own price list, in writing, before you book.
What is published about working in Guyana
We found no published figure for an average Guyanese salary that we could stand behind, so the draft's range of roughly USD 232 to USD 791 a month is out, along with the claim that the government has been streamlining visas for skilled workers. What is published is the machinery you would actually use.
The Ministry of Labour and Manpower Planning sits at 82 Brickdam, Georgetown, open Monday to Thursday from 8am to 4:30pm and Friday from 8am to 3:30pm, read on 24 October 2026. Its stated mandate includes establishing the national labor policy, promoting industrial relations through collective bargaining, resolving labor disputes, conciliation and mediation, certification of trade unions, and setting up and servicing arbitration tribunals. Its site carries separate sections for Labour Laws and for Occupational Safety and Health Laws, and a national job bank portal. That is where a dispute goes, and it is more useful than a salary average nobody published.
For an employment visa, Immigration Support Services lists the documents it requires before you start: passport pages with stamps, a passport photo, the passport biodata page, a contract or letter of employment, police clearance and a medical report. Its note matters for anyone arriving from a country that does not work in English: All supporting documents that are not in English must be submitted along with an English translation.
What expats should know
- There is no sourced country-by-country comparison in this article, because the measurements for the neighboring countries do not exist in our data.
- Budget rent from USD 1,500 upward, and treat it as one agency's asking prices from 20 listings read on 11 October 2026.
- Treat the market food prices as more than a year old. The Ministry's series stopped on 26 June 2025.
- Electricity is GYD 43.43 per kWh above 75 kWh a month, plus a fixed GYD 351.04 whether you use power or not.
- International school is USD 23,300 to USD 28,500 per child per year, not a few hundred dollars.
- Use the World Bank indicator codes if you want the comparison; that data is published the same way for every country.
- Get your salary, housing allowance and schooling support in the contract, in writing, before you accept.
- Ask, do not assume, about voltage and road rules. We could not find them on a Guyanese government page, so this article does not restate the supply voltage, the plug types or which side of the road traffic uses. Ask GPL about the supply standard and the licensing authority about driving.
Where to check
Rents are aggregated Century 21 Guyana listings held in our own reference data, with the reading date and sample size above. Market prices are from the Ministry of Agriculture's Prevailing Retail Prices and fuel from GUYOIL's published price list. Tariffs are from Guyana Power and Light and the Public Utilities Commission's Approved Telecommunications Rates. School fees are from the U.S. Department of State fact sheet. Health spending is World Bank SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD, SH.XPD.GHED.PC.CD, SH.XPD.OOPC.PC.CD and SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS. Labor and visa information is from the Ministry of Labour and Manpower Planning and Immigration Support Services, both read on 24 October 2026. Where a Guyana dollar amount is set beside a US dollar one, the rate is 1 USD = 214.91 GYD, the Bank of Guyana rate our reference data holds for 21 October 2026.
AI-Generated Content: This article was created with AI assistance and may contain inaccuracies. Please verify important information with official sources.
Primary Sources
Last updated: October 2026
