Which city is actually cheaper — Cebu, Davao, or Iloilo?

How this is calculated

The ranked answer runs on the two lines every one of the three cities publishes as a DATED ledger: rent and electricity. Electricity is your declared monthly kWh times that city's current ₱/kWh (VECO for Cebu, Davao Light for Davao, MORE Power for Iloilo) — a real, dated utility rate. Rent is the mean of that city's editorial-baseline asking-rent midpoints for your chosen unit size; it is NOT a measured market rate (no listing sample has been collected for any city, n is null everywhere), and it drives the ranking, so treat the whole ranking as a planning prior. Water is shown per city for context but is NOT ranked: MCWD (Cebu) and DCWD (Davao) publish tiered tariffs, but MPIW (Iloilo) publishes no current minimum charge, so an Iloilo water bill cannot be computed and is left as a documented gap rather than invented. Basket quantities (kWh, m³, unit size) are user-editable declared assumptions; per-line rates are dated primary.

Formula

per city, per month:
  rent        = mean(editorial-baseline midpoints for the unit size)   // n = null
  electricity = your kWh × city ₱/kWh   (dated: VECO / DLPC / MORE)
  water       = city tariff bill(your m³)   // Cebu, Davao; Iloilo = gap

ranked subtotal = rent + electricity   (the two universal dated lines)
ranking = cities sorted by ranked subtotal, cheapest first
  (a city with no baseline segment for the chosen size is unranked, not guessed)

Constants + data sources (each dated)

Worked example (reproduce this by hand)

Assumptions

• The kWh and m³ are declared assumptions with published defaults (fan-only ~150 kWh, light-AC ~300, heavy-AC ~500; solo ~10 m³, couple ~15, family ~25), not a metered reading.
• Rent is the mean of a city’s editorial-baseline midpoints for the size — an arithmetic average of hand-written ranges, not a median and not a measured rent.
• Davao’s water figure is the Feb-2024 floor; a ~9.99% July-2024 tranche took effect with no published peso figures, so the real Davao bill is higher by an unpublished amount.

Known limits — what this does not model

• Ranks on rent + electricity only. It does not roll food, transport, internet or one-off setup costs into the ranking, because those are not dated per-city ledgers we can compare without inventing quantities (see the food/transport basis note below).
• Iloilo water is a documented gap (MPIW publishes no current minimum charge), so Iloilo’s total is rent + electricity only.
• Metro Manila is not included yet — the NCR utility primaries could not be verified live (see the note below). It is a planned fast follow, not a guess.