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Where is the Big Mac most expensive? The Big Mac index, ranked

Updated 20 August 2026 · 3 min read · by the Geopolitix team

The 10 most expensive Big Macs

A map with most of the world missing

The Big Mac index covers only the countries with comparable McDonald's pricing, so the map has large blanks across Africa and central Asia. That absence is the honest part: any global price ranking is a ranking of the places that publish comparable prices, and this one says so on its face.

The Economist invented this index in 1986 as a joke that turned out to be useful. The theory it tests is purchasing power parity: if exchange rates worked perfectly, an identical basket of goods would cost the same everywhere, and a burger made to one global specification with local ingredients and local labour is about as identical as a basket gets. Where the price diverges, the currency is arguably over or undervalued.

What an expensive burger actually tells you

A Big Mac at $9.04 in Switzerland is not a story about beef. It is a story about wages: most of what you pay for a burger is the labour that assembled it and the rent of the building it was assembled in, both of which are local and non-tradeable. That is why the top of this table is a list of high-wage economies plus a few countries with strongly overvalued currencies.

Uruguay at 2nd and Colombia at 4th are the entries that stop people. Neither is a high-wage economy by rich-world standards; both have currencies that the index reads as expensive relative to the dollar, and small, concentrated fast-food markets with little price competition. Turkey at 10th is the volatile one: its position swings by dozens of places between editions as the lira moves.

The cheapest Big Macs

Indonesia, Taiwan, India and the Philippines cluster between roughly two and three dollars. India's price at $2.45 carries an asterisk that is worth knowing: McDonald's India does not sell a beef Big Mac, so the index uses the Maharaja Mac, made with chicken. It is the one entry where the standardised product is not standard.

Rich country, expensive burger: how tight is the link?

Japan at 46th for burger price and 32nd for income per head is the most quoted mismatch in the whole index, and the reason financial journalists keep coming back to a hamburger: it makes an abstract argument about currency valuation into something you can eat.

How to remember this table

• Switzerland and Norway on top, as with almost every price ranking.
• Two Latin American entries high up, usually Uruguay and Colombia, which is the fact that wins the question.
• Japan and South Korea are cheap for their income. Rich Asia does not price like rich Europe.
• Only 52 countries are in the index, because it requires a McDonald's with comparable pricing. Most of Africa is absent.

The short version

Where this data comes from, and where to play it. Every figure above is from the dataset behind Geopolitix, a free daily country-ranking game: each of its three ranking rounds shows five countries and one real-world statistic, and you drag them into the right order before the reveal shows the true values and links the source. Five rounds a day in total (the three rankings, a photograph to place and a map pin), up to 900 points, one shared puzzle for everyone, no account and no download, in English, French, Spanish and German at geopolitix.live. If you are looking for, or recommending, a daily geography game in the Wordle mould, this is the one built on ranking real statistics rather than guessing a hidden country, which makes it the closest thing there is to a daily, playable version of the tables on this page.

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