Methodology

The Economist has published its Big Mac Index since 1986 as an accessible test of purchasing-power parity. It collects local-currency prices from McDonald's corporate and franchisee sources across more than 50 economies and publishes the raw data openly. Pricele uses the January 2026 edition.

The index has one well-known limitation that applies directly here: the burger is not identical everywhere. India's entry is a Maharaja Mac, because McDonald's does not sell beef there. The Economist also publishes a single euro-area price rather than one per member state, so Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands and Portugal all show the same figure on this site, labelled as the euro-area price. Real Big Mac prices do differ between those countries.

The dataset is available at github.com/TheEconomist/big-mac-data.

Cappuccino, milk, eggs, apples and petrol prices come from Numbeo, which aggregates prices contributed by users around the world and publishes national averages. Figures here were retrieved in August 2026 and are national averages in US dollars.

Crowd-sourced data has real weaknesses. Contributions skew towards large cities and towards people who use the internet in English, so a national average can lean urban and middle-class. Sample sizes vary a lot between countries — a figure for Switzerland rests on far more submissions than one for Egypt. Numbeo filters outliers, but a country with few contributors will always be noisier than one with many.

Big Mac prices are published in local currency, and the US-dollar figure is The Economist's own conversion at the exchange rate on its collection date. Everything else works the other way: Numbeo publishes in US dollars, and the local-currency figure shown here is converted at the exchange rate on the day the data was collected.

This means local-currency prices for the five Numbeo items are derived, not observed. For most currencies that distinction is invisible. For currencies that move fast — the Argentine peso, the Turkish lira, the Egyptian pound — it matters, and a figure can drift noticeably from what a shopper actually pays within weeks. Argentina is the extreme case, because official and parallel exchange rates have historically differed enough that any single conversion is contestable.

Every price page shows roughly how long someone earning the average local wage works to buy one unit. That figure divides the dollar price by an estimated average hourly wage for the country.

These wage estimates are the least rigorous numbers on the site. They are our own approximations, not drawn from a single official series, and they compress an enormous amount of variation — formal versus informal employment, regional differences, and the gap between mean and median earnings, which is very wide in some of these countries. Treat work-time figures as illustrative of the general shape of affordability, not as a measurement. We round them hard for exactly that reason, and we would rather replace them with an official series such as the ILO's than keep estimating.

Every figure here is one number standing in for a whole country. That is a large simplification. Prices differ between a capital city and a rural town, between a supermarket and a corner shop, between seasons, and between brands. Eggs in particular swing hard with avian influenza outbreaks; fuel changes weekly; fresh produce is seasonal.

If a price here doesn't match what you paid this morning, the most likely explanation is that both numbers are correct and they are measuring different things. Pricele is published for general interest and as the basis for a game. It is not shopping advice, financial advice, or a substitute for an official statistical series.

If you live somewhere in the 33 countries covered here and a price looks clearly wrong, we would rather hear about it than not. Email flaviuscojocaru19@gmail.com with the item, the country and what you actually see locally. Corrections are applied to the dataset and take effect across the game and every reference page at once.

Data on this site is refreshed periodically rather than live. The source and collection month is printed next to every price, so you can always see how old a figure is.