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Bermuda is routinely ranked among the most beautiful places on earth. But for a growing number of Bermudians, that beauty comes at a cost few can comfortably bear.

The signs are visible in everyday life — in supermarket aisles across Hamilton, where shoppers fill modest baskets, compare price tags carefully, and quietly put items back on the shelf. These aren't the habits of visitors. They are the daily reality of Bermudians trying to get by in a place where a routine grocery run can cost double what it would almost anywhere else.

A crisis measured in numbers

By nearly every global benchmark, Bermuda ranks among the most expensive places to live. Overall living costs run roughly 226 per cent above the global median, and average rents sit about 357 per cent above it. A litre of milk runs around $5.10, a kilo of chicken about $22.91, a loaf of bread $8.72, and a dozen eggs $8.18. These aren't indulgences — they're the staples of a family's weekly shop, typically costing more than double what the same goods would cost in the United States or Britain.

None of this will surprise residents. But it bears repeating, because the consequences aren't abstract statistics — they are lived realities: families stretched thin, young professionals who love the island but can't picture a future here, and seniors who worked a lifetime yet still can't retire comfortably in their own home. This is not simply an inconvenience. It is a social crisis the community has been slow to confront directly.

Doing the math

A family of four in Bermuda faces average monthly expenses of roughly $13,687, covering rent, food, healthcare, transport, education and utilities — a figure that climbs to around $23,173 for a comfortable standard of living. Against that, the average monthly salary sits near $7,500. Even for a single person, the average income doesn't comfortably stretch to cover average living costs, let alone support a family.

Housing dominates the household budget. Rent alone eats up roughly 45 per cent of a typical family's monthly spending — far beyond the 28 to 30 per cent that housing economists generally consider sustainable. One-bedroom apartments in central Hamilton average around $3,600 a month, while even modest three-bedroom homes start between $800,000 and $1.2 million to buy, putting ownership out of reach for most working families without significant outside help.

Sticker shock at the checkout

Food prices compound the housing squeeze. Groceries in Bermuda run about 185 per cent higher than in the United States — itself no bargain by global standards. The reason is structural: the island grows almost nothing domestically, relies almost entirely on imports (mostly from the US), and applies import duties averaging around 36 per cent on most goods, including some food items. A sugar tax, a food preparation tax, and duties on certain meat, fish, fruit and vegetables add further weight, even though some essential foodstuffs are now duty-free. Import duty remains the Government's second-largest revenue source — and it's ordinary households, not corporations, who feel it most at the till.

Who carries the heaviest load

High prices don't land evenly. As in any society, they hit hardest those who can least absorb them — a dimension of the crisis too often lost in purely economic analysis. Because Bermuda's revenue system leans heavily on import duties and payroll taxes, it is inherently regressive, taking a proportionally larger bite out of lower incomes than higher ones.

Economist Robert Stubbs, formerly of the Bank of Bermuda, once described the island's combination of extreme income inequality, steep tax regressivity and a punishing cost of living as creating the conditions for widespread economic hardship. Little in the years since suggests that mix has eased.

Seniors feel it acutely. Many who worked their entire lives on the island find that retiring on a fixed income simply doesn't work here. Health insurance alone can run $300 to $600 a month per adult, before any out-of-pocket costs, while property taxes, food and utilities show no mercy for age. For many, a comfortable retirement at home has become an aspiration reality won't allow.

Young professionals face a different but equally frustrating version of the same problem. Many earn salaries that would afford a comfortable life in Toronto, London or Atlanta — yet here, those same salaries leave little room to save for a home, start a family without financial strain, or build the security earlier generations took for granted. Increasingly, they choose to leave — not because they don't love the island, but because staying has become an ongoing act of financial strain.

Voting with their feet

The Bermuda Government's January 2025 Emigration Survey Report makes for sobering reading. It found that 78 per cent of respondents cited the high cost of living as a primary reason for leaving, 65 per cent pointed to housing unaffordability, and 52 per cent cited limited job opportunities. Tellingly, those who left reported markedly higher satisfaction with their lives overseas — particularly around cost of living, healthcare affordability and general quality of life.

That is more than a personal story of relocation. It's a pointed signal about the economic conditions Bermuda has allowed to take hold. The Government's own Retaining the Local Workforce Position Paper 2024 flagged a demographic triple threat — a declining birthrate, an ageing population and rising emigration — that could reshape the island's social and economic character if left unaddressed. With a population of roughly 63,800 as of mid-2025, Bermuda is already one of the smallest national communities in the world; it can ill afford to keep losing its working-age residents.

When asked what might have kept them from leaving, respondents didn't ask for anything extraordinary: a more manageable cost of living, more job opportunities, better public and post-secondary education, and a more vibrant, appealing place to build a life. These are the basic ingredients of a functioning economy — achievable, but only with political will and honest structural reform.

Where the problem really comes from

Bermuda's high costs aren't the product of a single cause, and its constraints are real: 21 square miles of mid-Atlantic rock with virtually no agriculture, no domestic energy production, and total dependence on shipping for nearly every physical good consumed.

But geography doesn't explain everything. Funding government mainly through import duties — taxes that fall hardest on daily necessities — is a policy choice, not an inevitability. The same is true of housing regulation, constrained new supply, and limited social housing: these are the accumulated results of decades of decisions, and they can be revisited. The economy's heavy tilt toward international financial services and insurance, which generates high incomes at the top but comparatively few accessible-wage jobs, likewise reflects deliberate strategic choices with trade-offs worth examining openly.

Market competition compounds the problem. A small island economy with a limited consumer base struggles to sustain real retail competition, and a handful of supermarket operators effectively serve the whole island. Combined with high import duties, that leaves consumers with little real ability to shop around for better prices. For senior professionals in international business, whose salaries comfortably absorb $22 chicken, the cost-of-living crisis is an annoyance rather than a threat to survival — and there's a real risk that policy gets shaped by their experience rather than that of the growing number of Bermudians for whom it isn't.

What it costs the community

Beyond the balance sheets lies a harder question: what kind of community is Bermuda becoming? Community isn't just an economic aggregate — it's built through proximity, continuity, shared memory and the everyday texture of life: neighbours who know each other, churches that stay together, schools woven into families across generations.

All of that is at risk when the economics of daily life push people to leave, or push them into a kind of internal exile — physically present but too financially stretched to participate fully in community life. What happens to congregations when members can't afford to stay? To sports clubs and local associations when the people who sustain them are emigrating or working two jobs just to cover rent? These losses don't show up in any GDP figure, but they are real, cumulative, and hard to reverse once they take hold.

As one observer put it: when people who love this island feel they have no choice but to leave, something is broken — not in them, but in the conditions the community has collectively allowed to persist.

An honest conversation, not incremental fixes

This isn't a policy prescription so much as a call to face the scale of the problem honestly. Incremental tweaks at the margins won't match a crisis of this size. The conversation Bermuda needs — urgent, honest and genuinely inclusive — has to confront a tax structure that burdens life's basic necessities most heavily. It has to tackle housing supply and affordability beyond cosmetic fixes. It has to ask whether an economic model built around exceptional wealth at the top is delivering real inclusion for everyone else. And it has to take seriously what departing residents are saying — not to judge them, but to understand them.

It's also worth recognising what Bermuda gets right: a functioning democracy, low violent crime, a strong social fabric, extraordinary natural beauty, and a community capable of real solidarity when it comes together. These strengths are the foundation on which a fairer economic arrangement could be built — if the political will exists to build it.

The measure of a community isn't how it treats those who are thriving. It's how it treats those who are struggling — the family swapping chicken for something cheaper, the young nurse weighing whether she can afford another year here, the retired teacher hoping her pension stretches to month's end. What Bermuda chooses to do for them will define what kind of community it becomes.

This island is worth fighting for. But that fight has to start with an honest reckoning of what it costs to live here — and who is bearing that cost in ways they can no longer sustain.

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