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What a Big Mac costs around the world — and what it says about your money

What a Big Mac costs around the world — and what it says about your money

Welcome to Mapped — one dataset turned into one map, every week. This week: the price of a burger.

Since 1986, The Economist has tracked one of the most quietly useful numbers in global finance: the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac in different countries. The idea is that the same burger — same beef, same bun, made to the same spec everywhere — should cost roughly the same everywhere once you convert currencies. Where it doesn’t, the gap tells you which currencies are over- or undervalued against the US dollar.

Here’s the July 2026 index, in US dollars:

Big Mac price by country in US dollars, July 2026

What you’re looking at

Switzerland tops the world at $9.04 — the clearest sign anywhere that the Swiss franc is strongly overvalued against the dollar. Norway ($8.05) and the Nordics sit right behind, as usual.

The surprises this year are in Latin America. Uruguay ($8.94) and Colombia ($8.00) both out-price the United States, whose $6.22 burger is the benchmark the whole index is measured against. When a middle-income country’s Big Mac costs more than an American one, it’s a flag that its currency has run hot.

Now follow the map east and it goes pale. A Big Mac costs about $2.38 in Indonesia, $2.42 in Taiwan and $2.45 in India — barely a third of the Swiss price. By the burger’s logic, those currencies are deeply undervalued against the dollar, which is exactly why manufacturing and tourism there feel so cheap to a visitor paying in dollars or euros.

The takeaway

The Big Mac index was invented as a joke to make exchange-rate theory digestible. Forty years later, economists still reach for it — because a burger you can buy on six continents turns out to be a surprisingly honest yardstick for money.

Make this map yourself

The whole map is one maproll URL:

https://api.maproll.io/map.svg?scope=world
  &data=CH:9.04,UY:8.94,US:6.22,JP:3.08,ID:2.38...
  &theme=light&legendTitle=Price%20in%20USD

Drop in your own numbers, change the palette, and embed it anywhere an image tag works. Build one in 60 seconds →

Source: The Economist Big Mac Index, July 2026 release (dollar_price). The euro area is published as a single price and shown here on all euro-area countries. Next week on Mapped: subscribe below to get it first.