How Mexico City and Buenos Aires compare on cost, visas, working hours, weather, internet and safety. Every figure comes from our city guides and tools, checked and dated there.
Dollars and pounds at today's exchange rate. Download speeds are the typical figure from each guide, which says where it comes from: some are for the city, some for the whole country, so treat a small gap as no gap.
Rent, a coworking desk, a cheap lunch on each of 22 working days, and getting around: the same four costs our budget calculator uses. The rent figures aren't always the same kind of figure (some are furnished one-beds, some are averages across every size of flat), so read the note under each.
$933 to $1,460£701 to £1,100 a month
$878 to $2,130£659 to £1,600 a month
Residente Temporal, economic solvency
The catch. Every consulate prints its own figure. Check the sheet for the one you will apply at, and apply before you travel: it cannot be done inside Mexico.
Digital nomad temporary residence
The catch. You apply in person at the immigration office in Argentina, and only passports that can visit visa-free qualify.
See where your own income stands in every country. Check your income
A 9am to 5pm day in the employer's city, shown in local time, for today's date, so it allows for the clocks changing.
Different hours or another employer city? Use the time-zone planner
The average high in °C each month, coloured by the rule on our best-time page: green is a high of 20 to 32°C with under 150mm of rain; red is a high of 38°C or more or under 12°C, 250mm of rain or more, or 33°C or more with 150mm of rain or more. Hover over a month for its rain.
| City | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mexico City | 22° | 24° | 26° | 28° | 27° | 26° | 25° | 25° | 24° | 24° | 23° | 22° |
| Buenos Aires | 30° | 29° | 27° | 23° | 19° | 16° | 16° | 18° | 20° | 23° | 26° | 29° |
Mexico City: seasons and events · Buenos Aires: seasons and events
Level 2: increased caution
Level 1: normal precautions
The US level is for the whole country, as the State Department sets it, and some countries have stricter advice for particular regions.
From each city guide, word for word.
You have functional Spanish or a real intention to get it, you earn in dollars or pounds, and you want a genuine city rather than a nomad compound. If you can show roughly 80,000 to 84,000 pesos a month on paper you get a four-year residency route with a five-year path to a passport, which is unusually generous. Live in Juarez or San Rafael rather than Condesa and you pay about a third of Condesa rent for the same commute. Buy a desk instead of pretending cafes work, and the infrastructure holds up fine.
You want a cheap, clean, easy city. The air was officially clean on 15 days out of 273 this year. You will live 2,240 metres up, which flattens people for a fortnight. The British government tells you not to hail taxis, not to use street ATMs and not to leave your drink, in a city where 59.8 per cent of adults already feel unsafe. Take the obvious flat in Roma or Condesa and you are on the soft lakebed where 2017 shook fifty times harder than firm ground, in the exact building height that fell, in the neighbourhoods where hundreds marched in July 2025 to tell foreigners to leave. Their complaint is arithmetically correct: Cuauhtemoc rents rose 13.7 per cent in a year against a 3.69 per cent cap that protects everyone except the newcomer.
You have hard-currency income and you want a genuinely major city rather than a stopover. Three years of temporary residency gets you permanent status, and the rental market has more supply than it has had in years — freely negotiable, landlords who will take dollars, no guarantor if you pay ahead. It suits anyone whose Spanish is decent or who intends to make it so, and anyone who would rather live somewhere with a life of its own than somewhere assembled for visitors. And it suits people who can hold two ideas at once: that this is a country in the middle of a violent macroeconomic adjustment, and that right now, for somebody earning abroad, that adjustment has produced a stable and unusually good-value place to work from.
If you want the number on the page to still be the number in three months, go somewhere else. Inflation is 33.5 per cent a year and every peso figure here will be wrong by Christmas. The exchange-rate arbitrage that made this city famous among nomads is dead — the blue rate beats the official rate by about one per cent, so anyone still telling you to bring five thousand dollars in cash is describing 2023. English will get you fed and will not get you through an immigration appointment. Under the 2025 decree you now need health insurance and proof you can support yourself, and if you leave for six months your residency evaporates. Citizenship still says two years and now says continuous, which means two years without going home.
Most visas want health cover for the whole stay. Compare nomad health insurance · Build your trip checklist