The Taxi Index: how far £10 takes you in 12 Asian cities.

We've measured your beer. We've measured your lunch. We've measured your morning coffee. Time to measure how you actually move around a city.

Welcome to the Taxi Index. Standardised on the Numbeo benchmark for one kilometre of standard-tariff taxi travel, converted to sterling at current rates. The question we're asking is simple. How far does a £10 note take you in 2026, in twelve cities a British expat or digital nomad might actually live in?

The answer is going to surprise you, because for the first time in this series the cheap places aren't the same cheap places.

The 2026 Taxi Index

For context, a London black cab is roughly £2.40/km after the drop, an Uber in central London works out around £1.80/km. A taxi in central Manchester runs about £1.30/km on the meter.

Transport changes the answer when two places look similar on rent. That is why Bangkok vs Pattaya, Bangkok vs Hua Hin and Phuket vs Pattaya are not just lifestyle comparisons. They are taxi, airport and hospital-access comparisons too.

Three things this table tells you

One, Singapore breaks the rules

This is the bit that genuinely surprised me when I ran the numbers. Singapore, the most expensive city on every other index we've published, comes in fourth cheapest on taxis.

£10 buys you 16 km in Singapore. The same £10 buys you 10 km in Bangkok and 9 km in Hong Kong. Singapore's taxi fares are roughly half of Bangkok's per kilometre, and a third of Tokyo's.

Why? Because Singapore taxis are tightly regulated, the meter rates are set by the Land Transport Authority, and there's enough competition - ComfortDelGro, TransCab, plus Grab - to keep prices down. The drivers earn decent wages, the vehicles are clean, the meters always run. It's a functioning regulated market.

Compare that to Bangkok, where the meter sits at 35 baht for the first kilometre and adds 6.5 baht per km after, in theory, but where drivers will frequently refuse the meter, demand a flat fare, or simply tell you they don't want your route. Or Hong Kong, where the cars are well-maintained but the fares have ratcheted up steadily for two decades. Bangkok and Hong Kong feel cheaper than Singapore in your head. The Taxi Index says otherwise.

Two, Tokyo is in a category of its own

£2.49 per kilometre. That's roughly UK black cab pricing, in a country famous for cheap, efficient public transport.

The Tokyo story is specific. Japanese taxi fares are set high deliberately, to encourage people onto trains and to support the wage of the older, predominantly male, taxi driver workforce. The cars are immaculate. The drivers wear white gloves. The doors open and close automatically. You get what you pay for, but you pay London prices for it.

For a British family thinking about a Tokyo posting, this is a meaningful budget line. If you're used to grabbing a Bangkok taxi for £3 to get across town, the Tokyo equivalent will cost you £25, and you'll feel it every time.

The flip side: Tokyo's train and metro system is so good, you almost never need a taxi. Locals use them for late-night journeys home after the trains stop. The high price is doing its job of pricing people onto rail.

Three, the Philippines is the bargain nobody mentions

Manila and Cebu sit at the top of the table for affordability. £10 gets you 53-56 km. That's enough to cross the entire Manila metro area twice over. In Cebu it's enough to take you from the city centre out to the beach resorts on Mactan Island and back.

Combine this with the Philippines' English proficiency, the highest in our cheap-tier countries, and you've got a country where a Brit can communicate, move around freely, and pay relatively little for the privilege. The Beer Index has the Philippines at £1.18-£1.24 per beer, mid-table. The Taxi Index has it firmly cheapest. The composite picture is more attractive than people realise.

The catch, and there always is one, is that "taxi" in Manila increasingly means Grab, the Southeast Asian Uber. The independent metered taxi sector has been hollowed out. Grab pricing during peak hours can double or triple the table figure. The Cebu and Manila numbers in this table are off-peak baseline. Plan accordingly.

What this means for your monthly budget

Let's make this concrete. If you take three taxis a day, five days a week, average journey 5km each, here's your monthly transport spend in each city:

• Manila: £58/month
• Hanoi: £138/month
• Singapore: £183/month
• Bangkok: £291/month
• Hong Kong: £318/month
• Tokyo: £747/month

That last number is real. A Tokyo expat who relies on taxis instead of trains is looking at £750 a month in cab fares. That's £9,000 a year. That's a small car in the UK. Just for taxis.

This is why expat packages in Tokyo always include a transport allowance, and why most expats living there learn to read kanji on the train map within their first month. The taxi price is doing its work of forcing behaviour change.

The Vietnam outlier

Hanoi at £0.46 per km. Saigon at £0.50. Da Nang at £0.55.

In every Index we've published, Vietnam has been the cheapest or near-cheapest. The Beer Index put Hanoi at 75p. The Pad Thai Index equivalent, a bowl of phở, put it at £1.55. The Coffee Index put Hanoi at £2.06.

The Taxi Index continues the pattern. Vietnam is consistently 30-50% cheaper than Thailand on every consumer category we've measured.

Some of this is real, the dong is genuinely weaker than the baht, and local prices haven't caught up. Some of it is just timing, Vietnam is where Thailand was in 2010-2015, before the global tourism wave priced it up. The Taxi Index will not stay at these levels for long.

If you're a digital nomad making a five-year plan, Hanoi at £138 a month for daily taxis vs Bangkok at £291 a month is not a small difference. Over five years, that's £9,200 in transport costs alone, before you factor in beer, food, coffee, or rent.

The hidden taxi inflation nobody talks about

The Taxi Index above measures published meter rates. It doesn't measure what you actually pay. And what you actually pay, in 2026, is increasingly determined by ride-hailing apps, not metered cabs.

In Bangkok, Grab and Bolt now handle more journeys than metered taxis in the city centre, and their pricing uses dynamic surge models that can push fares 1.5x to 3x the published rate during peak hours, rain, or major events.

In Singapore, similar story. The official fare is what it is, but Grab's "Premier" tier, often the only available option during peak hours, costs 50% more.

In Manila and Cebu, Grab is now the default, and surge pricing has made some "cheap" routes routinely double their off-peak cost.

The net effect: the Taxi Index above understates what you'll actually spend on transport in most major cities by 20-40%. The cheap end stays cheap, Manila at peak surge is still cheaper than Bangkok off-peak, but the gap between the headline and the real number is widening every year.

What the Taxi Index is really measuring

Like every Index in this series, the headline number is one thing, the structural insight is another.

Taxis are a hyper-local service. They can't be imported. They can't be outsourced. They depend on local labour, local fuel costs, local regulation, and local urban density. Of all the indices we've published, the Taxi Index is the one most strongly anchored to a single country's actual economic conditions.

Which means when you see Tokyo at £2.49 and Cebu at £0.18, you're not just seeing two different prices. You're seeing two completely different labour markets, two completely different regulatory regimes, two completely different stages of economic development, all collapsed into one purchase you make every day.

The Taxi Index is the most honest cost-of-living metric we have, because it can't lie. Beer can be imported. Coffee culture can be globalised. Pad thai gets gentrified. But a 5km taxi ride is the same 5km taxi ride in every city, and the price is whatever the local economy can sustain.

The takeaway

If you're picking a Southeast Asian city to live in based on cost of living, the Taxi Index changes the maths.

Bangkok loses ground. It's mid-table on beer, mid-table on coffee, expensive on taxis. The composite picture is "not as cheap as you remember." If you still need Bangkok access but want lower coastal rent, Bangkok vs Pattaya is the practical next comparison.

Singapore looks much better than its Beer Index reputation suggests. Yes, the beer is £6.14. But the taxi is £0.61. If you take more taxis than beers, most middle-aged professionals do, Singapore's daily cost might surprise you.

Manila and Cebu emerge as quiet winners. Cheap drinks, cheap food, cheap transport, English-speaking. The Philippines is the Southeast Asian destination Brits underweight in 2026, and the data keeps pointing the same way.

And Vietnam stays Vietnam. The cheapest beer, the cheapest food, the cheapest coffee, the cheapest taxis. Whatever the Index, Hanoi is on the right side of it. The window is still open.

Mine's a 5km cab to a café where the coffee is still £2 and the wifi is decent. Total cost: £4.30. Try doing that in central London for under twenty.