How long do you have to work to afford Microsoft Office? That’s the question we asked after compiling a list of Office 365 prices across the globe, Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal.
For most people it’s not long but there’s a lot of variation from less than one day to over four days!
In 2018 we found some median income stats for 33 major countries and matched them to the local prices of Office 365 Home (now called Microsoft 365 Family – however prices haven’t changed in most countries). The results are interesting though, we hasten to add, for illustrative purposes only. There are various grey areas in the calculations and data that we detail in the remarks below the table. Those issues don’t severely affect the overall results but would trouble any statistical experts.
Poor Office 365 affordability
Most of the poor affordability locations are Euro zone countries with lower median income.
So, it’s harder to afford Office 365 Home/Microsoft 365 Family in lower income Euro countries like Latvia, Lithuania and Portugal.
The exception outside the Euro zone is Mexico which is, surprisingly, another poor affordability country. Perhaps Microsoft has raised the Mexican price to discourage US customers from buying from ‘south of the border’?
Best Microsoft 365 affordability
Canada, Australia, Norway and Sweden are the most affordable places to buy Office 365 Home/Microsoft 365 Family. They share relatively high incomes but lower Microsoft 365 prices.
Luxembourg, with the highest median income in the Euro zone, is the most affordable European country.
After rounding you can add the United States to the countries where it takes less than a day to pay for Office 365 Home/Microsoft 365 Family.
And that’s before you take into account the lower street prices available in these good affordability countries.
See range of global prices for Microsoft 365 Family.
The Euro Zone gap
Microsoft has a single fixed Euro zone price (EUR €99 for Microsoft 365 Family), regardless of different affordability in each Euro country. That makes for a wide affordability gap.
It takes more than five times longer to buy Microsoft 365 Family in Latvia than it does in Luxembourg.
Maximum: 4.2 days – Latvia
Minimum: 0.8 days – Canada (at 0.77, the only county below the 0.8 days value)
Average: 1.7 days – Ireland/Slovenia
Median: 1.5 days – Saudi Arabia
Standard Deviation: 0.831
Remarks
The original version of this article was horribly wrong. We’re very obliged to Tim Boreham who brought us back to the path of statistical and mathematical righteousness. Any remaining ‘bludners’ are entirely our own.
- We’ve used Microsoft’s advertised 2018 retail price for Office 365 Home which usually excludes state and local taxes.
- The actual ‘street’ price paid may be lower if there’s plenty of competition in that market.
- Median Daily Income is calculated as median self-reported household income divided by 365.
- Data from https://www.statista.com/statistics/318120/ranking-of-countreis-by-median-household-income/
- The income data is self-reported.
- The median household income has been used so we’ve only compared with Office 365 Home (five licence) plan.
- No attempt to match the median incomes to the actual price of Office 365 Home in the years those incomes were earned.
- The 15 Jan 2018 exchange rates were used. Not the exchange rates that would have been applicable at the time the incomes were earned or Office 365 would have been purchased.
- Not all countries in our original Office 365 Home price survey are represented in the median household income data.
- Because the income could include investment and interest we’ve divided the annual income by 365 days. Not approximate working days in a year.
- Due to all these irregularities, we’ve rounded the ‘Days to afford Office 365 Home’ to one decimal place. That seems like an appropriate accuracy level.
- The chart is in ‘Days to pay …’ order after rounding.
