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South African families are right to weigh up whether to stay in the country or build a future elsewhere. These are personal decisions about security, opportunity, and their children’s prospects. But alongside what a family might gain by leaving, it is important to consider what it could lose in everyday quality of life.

A spacious home with a garden, domestic help, good schools, and regular family outings and holidays can feel like ordinary features of a South African middle-class life. Elsewhere, maintaining that combination demands a substantially higher income. Emigration can bring the value of these comforts into focus when families discover how much they would need to earn to preserve a lifestyle they previously took for granted.

To explore this, The Common Sense developed a comparative exercise with a straightforward starting point. Take the quality of life enjoyed by a middle-class South African family and estimate what it would cost to recreate it in another major city. The reference household has two working adults and two children. Its lifestyle is measured through six broad categories: housing, transport, education, healthcare, domestic assistance, and leisure.

The housing benchmark is a mortgage on a spacious family house with a garden in a good, secure suburb. The family drives two cars, sends its children to a high-quality primary school and pre-school, and enjoys access to healthcare comparable to good South African private provision. Full-time domestic help, regular leisure activity, and one substantial local holiday each year complete the picture.

The cities selected for comparison are Johannesburg, Cape Town, London, Perth, Auckland, Toronto, Dubai, Houston, and New York. They represent a mix of popular emigration destinations for South Africans, ranging from relatively affordable cities to some of the world’s most expensive international centres.

The findings are shown in the chart below, with Johannesburg set as the benchmark at an index level of 100. A city scoring 150 has an estimated lifestyle basket costing 50% more than Johannesburg’s, while a score of 200 means recreating the same lifestyle costs twice as much.

The figures underlying the index are indicative estimates rather than complete household budgets, and readers are welcome to challenge our assumptions. Different choices about housing, schooling, and other expenses will affect individual results. The central conclusion, however, is that the comparison points to a substantial South African cost advantage; the precise size of the gap in any particular city is secondary.

The question is whether these advantages can endure as public services deteriorate and political instability persists. The answer lies in the process of enclavisation, about which The Common Sense has written extensively. Across South Africa, private businesses and organised communities are increasingly taking responsibility for services that the state can no longer reliably provide. Private healthcare, good schools, security, independent electricity generation, and locally managed infrastructure allow families to maintain high living standards despite the deterioration of public institutions. The result is that considerable comfort and prosperity can endure, even where the state performs poorly, provided families position themselves to benefit from these arrangements.

Some families will prioritise stability and predictability and choose to leave. Others will conclude that South Africa offers a quality of life that is difficult to replicate elsewhere. For them, staying can be a deliberate investment in their family’s future. The space to live comfortably, the support to raise children, access to good schools and healthcare, and the financial freedom to enjoy life are all meaningful measures of prosperity. These are things that families in many of the world's wealthiest countries struggle to afford, but which remain within reach of South Africa's middle class. For those who position themselves carefully, the country can remain one of the best places in the world to build a family, enjoy life, and prosper.