What's the cost of living in Morocco?

Morocco sits in that sweet spot of being genuinely affordable without feeling like you're roughing it. As a rough frame: a single person living comfortably in Marrakech or Agadir — modern furnished apartment, eating a mix of local and Western food, getting out and about — tends to land somewhere around $1,000 to $1,800 a month. A couple often lives well on $1,800 to $2,800. You can spend far less if you live like a local, and far more if you want a riad with a pool and dinners in five-star hotels.

Where your money goes a long way: fresh food is the joy of living here. A heaping market basket of vegetables, fruit, olives, bread and eggs costs a handful of dirhams; a plate at a neighbourhood restaurant is a few dollars; mint tea is pocket change. Taxis are cheap, intercity trains and buses cheaper still, and domestic help — a cleaner once or twice a week — is affordable enough that many expats and locals alike have it.

Where costs creep up: anything imported or 'Western.' A bottle of imported wine, foreign cheeses, branded electronics, international-school fees, and Western-standard apartments in the expat-favoured neighbourhoods all carry a premium. Alcohol in particular is taxed and not cheap. Utilities are modest, but air conditioning through a Marrakech summer will show on your electricity bill.

The honest texture of it: two people in the same city can have wildly different monthly numbers depending on whether they shop in the souk or the supermarket, take taxis or grand taxis, and rent in the medina or in Gueliz. My advice to clients planning a long stay is to budget generously for the first couple of months while you learn the real prices, then watch your spending settle as you find your local rhythm. Exchange rates and inflation move, so treat any figure as a current snapshot to verify on the ground.