Honolulu has moved up in a ranking of the world's costliest cities to live in, placing 41st of 143 metropolitan areas examined.

Mercer LLC, a consultant that annually examines the cost of living in cities around the globe, said Honolulu tied Brussels in this year's ranking, having jumped up the list from 77th place last year.

The survey is the second this year ranking Honolulu as among the costliest places to live. In June, ECA International, a firm that helps companies determine salaries for overseas employees, ranked Honolulu 25th most expensive of the 370 cities it examined.

The survey shouldn't be a surprise to many Hawai'i residents. Honolulu consistently ranks as having among the highest-priced U.S. homes, gasoline here costs more than in other states and electricity is the costliest of any state.

Mercer's survey lists Honolulu as among the top five most-expensive U.S. cities, with New York City (No. 8), Los Angeles (No. 23), the New York City suburb White Plains (No. 31), and San Francisco (No. 34) coming in ahead of Hawai'i's capital city.

Mercer's study is structured by using New York as the base city for the index. It measured the cost of more than 200 items in each city such as housing, transportation, clothing, household goods, food and entertainment.

Mercer, like ECA, noted there was much fluctuations in the rankings over the past year due to currency fluctuations. As such many European cities tumbled on the list, while cities in the U.S., China and Japan moved up.

"As a direct impact of the economic downturn of the last year, we have observed significant fluctuations in most of the world's currencies, which have had a profound impact on this year's ranking," Nathalie Constantin-Metral, Mercer senior researcher, said in a press statement.

"Many currencies, including the euro and British pound, have weakened considerably against a strong U.S. dollar, causing a number of European cities to plummet in the rankings," Metral said.

Tokyo grabbed the dubious distinction of being the costliest city on Earth, knocking Moscow (No. 3) from the perch it held last year.

Osaka was second, Geneva was fourth and Hong Kong came in fifth.

Other U.S. cities in the top 50 ranking released by Mercer were Miami (No. 45) and Chicago (No. 50).