Prices in South Korea 🇰🇷
What 7 everyday items cost in South Korea, shown in US dollars, in KRW, and as roughly how long someone earning the average local wage works to buy one.
South Korea has notably expensive fruit. Tariffs and quarantine rules restrict imports of many fresh products, and domestic orchard land is limited, so apples cost several times what they do in producing countries. Prepared food and transport, by contrast, are cheap for a high-income country.
What things cost
| Item | USD | Local | Work time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Big Mac | $3.74 | 5,500 KRW | 16 min |
| Coca-Cola (330ml can) | $1.46 | 2,000 KRW | 6 min |
| Cappuccino | $3.64 | 5,235 KRW | 16 min |
| Milk (1 litre) | $2.02 | 2,905 KRW | 9 min |
| Eggs (dozen) | $2.85 | 4,099 KRW | 12 min |
| Apples (1 kg) | $7.84 | 11,275 KRW | 34 min |
| Gasoline (1 litre) | $1.25 | 1,798 KRW | 5 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 South Korea compares
Relative to the rest of the game, South Korea is most expensive for apples, where it ranks 1st out of 32 countries at $7.84 — against a global median of $2.84.
It is relatively cheapest for big mac at $3.74, which is 26th of 33 — only 7 countries in the game are cheaper.
Measured against local earnings rather than dollars, the item that takes the longest to afford here is apples, at roughly 34 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
South Korea 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.