While locals have always known it, and the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit each year soon realise it, now the data has confirmed it: Cape Town offers the best quality of life of any city in Africa!
That’s according to new research from data and research consultancy Numbeo, which crunched the numbers across a range of metrics to highlight African cities that offered the best quality of life.
Billed as the world’s largest cost of living database, Numbeo also crowd-sources data on quality of life across housing indicators, perceived crime rates, healthcare quality, transport quality, and other statistics.
Those statistics are crunched into indexes that score cities on metrics including safety, healthcare, purchasing power index, cost of living index, commute times, pollution and the ratio of property prices to income.
In 2025, Cape Town once again topped the table for African cities, with an overall index score of 160.2. Pretoria, Durban and Johannesburg followed, with Casablanca (Morocco) the only city outside of South Africa to crack the top five. Cape Town also led the way in Health Care and (the lack of) Pollution. If you've been to any of Cape Town's Blue Flag beaches you'll likely agree!
However, as anyone stuck in Mother City rush hour can attest, it’s no surprise that Cape Town faltered when it came to commute time, with an index score of 42.4, nearly double Durban’s winning score of 25.5. But hey, it could be worse: Lagos ranked with the worst commute times in Africa, and an index score of 70.0. And with property prices skyrocketing, little wonder Cape Town came fourth for the ratio of property prices to income.
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