Who Decides What a Decent Life Costs?
If a living wage is supposed to support a decent life, the next question is surprisingly difficult: how much does a decent life actually cost?
WageIndicator’s 2026 methodology shows why the answer cannot come from food prices alone. Its cost-of-living calculations consider food, housing and utilities, transportation, drinking water, phone and internet access, clothing, healthcare, education, taxes, and unexpected expenses. The methodology has also evolved to reflect details such as school fees, books, transportation patterns, mobile data, and healthcare costs.
What struck me is that living wage calculations reveal what we collectively consider “necessary.” Internet access or education might once have been treated as optional expenses. Today, excluding them could mean excluding someone from school, employment, information, or society itself.
The numbers also cannot remain fixed. Local prices, family structures, and consumption patterns change, meaning that a wage considered adequate today may become inadequate tomorrow.
For our work at Megaphone, this raises a broader question about dignity. Measuring poverty tells us who falls below a minimum threshold. Measuring a living wage asks something more ambitious: what should every working person reasonably be able to participate in? The answer says as much about our definition of a decent society as it does about wages.
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