Prices in Australia 🇦🇺
What 7 everyday items cost in Australia, shown in US dollars, in AUD, and as roughly how long someone earning the average local wage works to buy one.
Australia combines high wages with high retail costs and long domestic supply lines. Groceries are concentrated between two supermarket chains, which the country's competition regulator has repeatedly examined, and fuel carries an excise that puts it above US levels but well below European ones.
What things cost
| Item | USD | Local | Work time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Big Mac | $5.69 | 8.5 AUD | 13 min |
| Coca-Cola (330ml can) | $2.21 | 3.5 AUD | 5 min |
| Cappuccino | $3.95 | 5.63 AUD | 9 min |
| Milk (1 litre) | $1.76 | 2.51 AUD | 4 min |
| Eggs (dozen) | $5.04 | 7.18 AUD | 12 min |
| Apples (1 kg) | $3.69 | 5.26 AUD | 9 min |
| Gasoline (1 litre) | $1.28 | 1.82 AUD | 3 min |
Local-currency figures are converted from US dollars at recent exchange rates, except the Big Mac, which is published in local currency by The Economist and converted the other way. Work time divides the dollar price by an estimated average hourly wage — the roughest number on this page. See methodology.
How Australia compares
Relative to the rest of the game, Australia is most expensive for coca-cola, where it ranks 3rd out of 33 countries at $2.21 — against a global median of $1.37.
It is relatively cheapest for gasoline at $1.28, which is 19th of 32 — only 13 countries in the game are cheaper.
Measured against local earnings rather than dollars, the item that takes the longest to afford here is big mac, at roughly 13 minutes of the average wage. Dollar prices and work-time prices often rank countries very differently — that gap is usually the more interesting number.
Play a puzzle
Australia comes up in the daily puzzle roughly once every 33 days, paired with a different item each time. Play today's puzzle or browse the archive of past rounds.