How we work it out

A salary on its own doesn't tell you much, so we work out one number for every school: your monthly surplus. It's simply what comes in minus what goes out. Pick any school on the Evaluate page to see it worked through.

We start from published cost-of-living data and our own price checks, then adjust it to how an expat teacher really lives. Where we can't find solid figures, we use our best estimate, and the notes beside the figures explain what they're based on. We'd rather show you something honest than leave a blank.

On Evaluate and Compare you can change the numbers to fit your life:

• Family status: single, couple, or family +1, +2 or +3. This sets your flat size (one bedroom if single, two for a couple or family +1, three for family +2 or +3), and groceries, dining, bills, phone and medical gaps rise with your household. A partner's pay is only counted if you add it on Evaluate.
• School fees: our figures assume your school covers your children's tuition, so no fees are included. We assume up to 2 children, the usual cap at top international schools, unless our research shows otherwise, often depending on places being available. A third child is rarely fully covered, so check the fees if you have three or more. Check your contract, including any levies, registration fees and school bus costs.
• Lifestyle: Saver, Comfort or Full Expat. Saver is a modest flat and cooking at home. Comfort is a comfortable flat with regular nights out and a few imported luxuries. Full Expat goes further than Comfort: a high-end flat, imported-brand groceries, and hotel dining and leisure at the weekends. Lifestyle changes your rent, groceries, and dining and social spending, but not your bills, phone, transport or medical gaps. If the school provides your housing, your rent stays covered on any setting.
• Housing (Evaluate): provided by the school, shared, or a one, two or three bedroom flat.
• Transport (Evaluate): public transport or car hire.
• Extra income: such as tutoring or a side job.
• Your own adjustments: plus or minus, for anything we haven't thought of.

When you compare schools, each one gets a match score out of 99. Each part has a maximum, so no single part can outweigh the rest:

• Savings, up to 50 points (the biggest part): what you'd have left each month after rent and everyday costs. Full marks at about US$4,000 a month. Savings in a currency with a history of sharp falls count for less.
• Academic score, up to 25 points: our rating of the school's academic standing.
• City safety and workload, up to 20 points: how safe the city is and how heavy the teaching load looks.
• Benefits we can confirm, up to 10 points: health cover, flights home and tuition for your children. Where we don't yet know about flights or tuition, they score in the middle, so a school isn't marked down for a gap in our data.
• Inflation, up to 10 points off: high inflation eats into savings. Every percentage point above 3% a year takes a point off.

Most schools score between 50% and 80%. Only schools that do well on every part reach the 90s.

The school with the highest score comes out top. If two schools score the same, the one that leaves you more money each month wins. Each card tells you why it ranks where it does.

City safety comes from government travel advice and is scored by country, so it's a broad guide rather than a measure of each neighbourhood. We start from the US State Department travel advisory level: Level 1 is 9.5 out of 10, Level 2 is 8.0, Level 3 is 6.0 and Level 4 is 3.0. We take off 1.0 where the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) advises against travel to the city's area. A city with no advice gets 8.0, the middle of all our cities. We check this advice every month. FCDO advice contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Neither government endorses Leopardfish Intel or these scores.

The score is a guide, not a verdict. A lower-scoring school might suit you better, for example if it has the curriculum or location you want.

Evaluate and Compare show each school in its local currency. To compare across countries, you can also see results in US dollars, pounds or euros, using rates we update every day.

These figures are estimates to help you compare schools. They aren't promises. Your own pay point, family and tax situation, spending habits, any extra income and any commitments back home will change the result, so use the adjustments boxes on Evaluate or Compare to add them in.

The finance score on Evaluate shows how a school's monthly surplus ranks among every school on Leopardfish Intel, from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest). It uses the same teacher everywhere: single, on Comfort, on our pay estimate, with no extra salaries, so it compares schools worldwide, not just within a country.

Spotted something wrong? Use the Feedback button on any page and we'll look into it.

Every job links to the school's own advert, on its own website, a school group's careers page or a job board such as TES. We never host application forms or change a school's job description. We check for new and closed jobs every day, and some by hand too.