Living in Bangkok pros and cons: 5 comparisons on life in two great places

Update October 2021: We’ve been living in Bangkok for nearly three years now and have updated this post with more current information. Living in Bangkok continues to be great for us, with more pros than cons – and I would encourage people thinking about it to give it a go!

Moving to Bangkok as a foreigner is a big decision, and living in Bangkok has many pros and cons (for us – far more pros than cons overall!).

It’s obviously a huge decision to move halfway across the world to a new country, lifestyle and culture – and while you might get a feel from Bangkok from a visit or two, living in Bangkok permanently is a distinctly different experience. With that in mind, here’s a quick guide to our experiences of living in Bangkok vs London. This isn’t by any means comprehensive, so if there are things you’re wondering about, ask away in the comments or contact us (see the About and Get in Touch pages)!

When we were deciding on whether to move here from London three years ago, there wasn’t a whole lot of useful information on the pros and cons, similarities and differences, and so we’ve written this to give a bit more of an idea of what to expect when moving to Bangkok and living in Bangkok.

Cost of Living in Bangkok

Living cost in Bangkok is very affordable. I once read an article that claimed than living in Bangkok was more expensive than London. This is actually true, but only if you’re doing it completely wrong (in my opinion). If you want to create a fully British life in Bangkok it’ll cost more than if you did it in the UK – unsurprisingly. If you want to get a bit stuck in with Thailand, living in Bangkok is considerably cheaper than the UK or most European cities.

Bangkok is an extremely low cost city compared to somewhere like London. Living in Bangkok should cost a fraction of what it does in the west. Let’s look at a couple of major outgoings:

Rent and bills– Pound for pound, rent in Bangkok is around a half to a third the cost of London. If a nice one bed flat in a well-located area of London might cost £1000, the equivalent in Bangkok should cost £300 to £500. Your money also goes further when living in Bangkok – for the same price as our 50sqm one bed in Hammersmith, we have lived in a 110sqm two bed in a luxury riverside condo with 7 swimming pools here in Bangkok (reason to move #1 right there…), and now a 180sqm 3 bed apartment. Living in Bangkok means your money goes a lot further. There’s also something for every budget, and we have friends who live in very nice, modern one bed apartments in central locations which are just 15,000 baht per month – that’s less than £400.

Bills are generally cheap when living in Bangkok. There’s no council tax and utilities are cheap. My phone contract has 4GB of data – more than enough – plus calls I never use for £10 a month. Water is £4 a month. Electricity is the only kicker and only if you have aircon. Your aircon unit will drain electricity like it’s trying to cool down a perennially hot climate, meaning our electricity costs between £50-80 per month, and with working from home much more during Covid, maybe closer to £100 a month.

Food and drink– Eating in Bangkok is quite a different thing compared to London, but it’s certainly a cheaper experience in the main. Every other shop in Bangkok is a restaurant, and the ones that aren’t all have food carts in them. The food scene in Thailand is world class, it’s impossible to eat badly. It’s also impossibly cheap.

As such, it’s much more common to eat out when living in Bangkok, which we do 4-5 times a week. Home cooking is a rarity to the point that some new condos are being built without kitchens. It’s difficult to find kitchens with proper ovens as well, but if you specify that when looking an agent would be able to find you one.

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Even so, dinners out usually cost in the range of £1 to £4 per head (for some insanely delicious fayre), which won’t even get you a Tesco meal deal back in the UK. Local food is cheap and delicious.

The flip side to this is the cost of ‘western’ food. A good thing to know is that most things that are imported to Thailand have a hefty import duty on them, including food. If you want to eat pasta and drink wine every night, you’re going to pay more than you would in Italy – which shouldn’t be too surprising. Wine is a good example here. Your typical £4 ‘danger bottle’ of crap plonk in the UK will set you back at least £15 here in Thailand. This extends to imported spirits too, although locally-made beers and spirits are comparatively cheap.

Develop a taste for the local Sangsom ‘whisky’ (actually rum), and you’ll save a packet and get outrageous hangovers without breaking the bank.

Home cooking can also be cheap when living in Bangkok; meat, fish, poultry and local veg are all very inexpensive. Again though, if you want a roast dinner on Sunday (in this heat! You must be mad!) it’ll cost you a pretty penny.

The list goes on and on – transport is cheap, travel is cheap, clothes are cheap unless you want western brands. The only things we’ve found which are bizarrely pricey in Thailand are bedding and towels, presumably because not many people want a full duvet here. Best to bring your own if you’re moving out here.

Lifestyle and culture

Day to day life in Bangkok is relaxed compared to London. This is almost entirely driven by the people, who are welcoming and generally chilled out. It’s rare to feel out of place and I can’t recall ever feeling unwelcome anywhere.

At the same time, Bangkok is a manic city in terms of people and traffic. The traffic in Bangkok is legendary and not easy to describe unless you’ve experienced it. Covid has certainly put a dent in the huge jams, but expect it to spring back as borders reopen.

Commuting on public transport is a decidedly intimate experience – if you think the Tube gets busy at rush hour, try getting on the Skytrain in the morning. Somebody once described their commute to me as a free daily massage, which is fairly apt. Prepare to look down and see upwards of three people nestled under your armpit.

You can get on a train with your feet hanging over the edge of the platform, only for five more souls to mould themselves into the atom-sized spaces around you. Obviously during Covid the crowding has dropped dramatically, but expect it to pick up once ‘normality’ resumes.

That said, it’s not a stressful experience. There’s never the kind of rage and low-level arsey-ness you see in London. Thai culture prizes respect and politeness, so you rarely see disagreements or people getting in a huff.

It’s fun and rewarding to experience Thai culture while living in Bangkok, and we feel lucky to live here. Learning the language is tough but extremely worthwhile and will get you a long way. There isn’t so much of a culture shock here – it’s easy to find home comforts if you need. But that said it’s also not too westernised – think somewhere like Singapore which is more like that in general. Bangkok feels very Thai in most respects.

The social side of things is a little different than in the UK. While we have a lot of Thai friends, there isn’t so much of the hanging out culture here. People seem to spend much of their free time with family, making it a little tough to truly fit in as an outsider. There just isn’t really a culture of drinks after work, weekend brunch, and that kind of (classic London) thing among most Thai people we know.

As such, friendship groups tend to be more focused around your fellow foreigners, which is fun and tricky at the same time. It can certainly be a more lonely experience living abroad and you will come to appreciate the depth of friendships and family relationships you’ve spent a lifetime building up!

Most of the trickiness is because nobody tells you how to make friends past the age of about 12. Most of us have school, college, uni groups who we stick with for life, and meeting people in your late 20s and 30s is – frankly – terrifying.

This is just a general reality of living abroad, nothing linked to Thailand. It obviously helps to get out and involved in things to find friends! We’ve met people through language schools, exercise groups and various random happenings. We’re lucky to have met a lot of really lovely people here in Bangkok, but it’s definitely one of the more challenging aspects of living in Bangkok.

Health, fitness and environment

Bangkok is a polluted city, no getting away from it. The millions of vehicles, the fondness for agricultural burning, the endless plastic waste and the ubiquitous construction combine to make a somewhat unpleasant environment.

Especially in the dry season, air pollution is a major issue of living in Bangkok, to the point where masks are a required part of your daily outfit. People complain about London’s air – Bangkok is literally 10x more polluted and the problem has become worse over time.

Plastic is a big problem too, although there’s a growing acknowledgement of the problem. On average a Thai person uses 8 plastic bags a day, each one having a lifespan of 12 minutes.

Bangkok is also not great for greenery. Lumpini Park offers a literal breath of fresh air, but there are relatively few parks and green spaces. A new central park is planned to be open by August and there are some great, green central Bangkok walks such as the Green Mile for a little outdoorsiness.

These conditions and the year-round heat dictate that most fitness work is done indoors. Most condos have gyms and pools, and a good gym membership isn’t very expensive.

Muay Thai is also a great option when living in Bangkok, with most gyms offering cheap classes which are good for any level. Most attendees are just there for the fitness rather than the fight, so it works out as an excellent workout rather than a daunting martial art.

If you want more outdoorsy stuff, you’ll need to brave the heat in the morning or evening to go for a run – Lumpini and Benjakitti are the main running hotspots, and since we’ve been living in Bangkok more green space is being built. The Green Mile in Bangkok is also a lovely outdoor option that links up the main parks, or you can hop across to the Green Lung across the river at Bang Krachao.

Another option is to get out of Bangkok entirely for the greener surroundings, which leads us nicely to…

Travel

We travel a lot from Bangkok and it’s a major perk of living here. Transport is cheap, be that a taxi to Khao Yai for a weekend in the jungle, or a train to Kanchanaburi to relax in a floating raft house. Thai and southeast Asian travel is a major plus of living in Bangkok. Even during Covid, local travel has been generally possible and there are many amazing places close to Bangkok.

Flights are also very inexpensive, although hardly helping with the environmental issues. Most companies in Asia now offer the option of carbon offset when booking which is a small step in the right direction. Another fun option is to take overnight trains north and south such as the overnight train to Chiang Mai. Since living in Bangkok we’ve enjoyed some great trips all over Thailand, from the lesser-known southern lights of Songkhla to an exceptional road trip up north through the cool mountainous greenery of the Mae Salong Loop.

There are a wealth of places within and close to Thailand to explore, from city breaks in Vietnam to the hundreds of gorgeous Thai islands. It’s possible to jump in a taxi in Bangkok and be on a beach in Phuket in about 3-4 hours, and there are also good islands like Koh Samet in driving distance from the capital.

We have loved every second of exploring Thailand and south east Asia since we moved to Bangkok, and living in Bangkok gives a great jumping off point to this fascinating country and beyond.

It’s a bit of a false comparison to say that travel is better when living in Bangkok. Living in London, we could have been to loads of places in the UK and Europe in a similar timeframe. Ok, they’re less exotic to us, but we could have done that just as easily, but certainly not as cheaply. But somehow a weekend in Skegness just doesn’t hold the same allure as a weekend in Phuket.

Leading us finally to…

Weather and Climate

It’s 30 degrees pretty much all year in Bangkok, it rains like you wouldn’t believe in September/October, and between November and April it might not rain at all.

For me, living in Bangkok is a hands down better climate than London, but I am a massive sun-seeker. If you struggle with the heat, prepare for a new dimension of sweatiness. I will put up with this because it means I never have to wear socks, ever, and this makes me happy.

A big bonus living in Bangkok is that you can enjoy beaches and sunny breaks most of the year. South east Asia has a few differennt micro-climates, so when it’s wet in Bangkok it might be dry in Koh Chang for example. It’s only really the end of September, beginning of October where this is happening everywhere:

The rest of the time, expect something a bit more like this:

Overall

We love living in Bangkok. It was a big decision for us to move, but we’ve found it great overall. It’s not all sunshine and pad Thai, and there pros and cons, downsides as well as positives, but overall we would gladly make the same decision again! Three years of contentment living in Bangkok is testament to how much we’ve enjoyed living in Thailand.

We’ve been living in Bangkok for a fair while now, so if you are thinking about moving to Bangkok or Thailand and have any questions, do feel free to comment or email us and we can (hopefully) answer your questions.

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