Big Mac Index API

Try it now

Paste this in a terminal. There is no setup step — the endpoint is live as you read this.

curl -s https://bigmacindex.app/data/countries.json | head -20

Every file under /data/ comes back with these headers, which is what makes browser fetch() work without a proxy:

Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Cache-Control: public, max-age=3600

Endpoints

Five files, all under https://bigmacindex.app/data/. GET and HEAD only.

Response fields

/data/countries.json

A flat array, sorted by USD price descending and pre-ranked.

[
  {
    "rank": 1,
    "code": "CHE",
    "slug": "switzerland",
    "name": "Switzerland",
    "flag": "🇨🇭",
    "region": "europe",
    "currency": {
      "code": "CHF",
      "symbol": "CHF"
    },
    "local_price": 7.3,
    "dollar_ex": 0.80735,
    "price_usd": 9.0419272929956,
    "diff_percent": 45.4
  },
  ...
]

/data/bigmac-latest.json

Same snapshot, raw Economist fields, sorted by ISO code. Note the field names are camelCase here and snake_case in countries.json — the two files were written years apart and the names are frozen so existing consumers keep working.

/data/bigmac-history.json

An object keyed by snapshot date, not an array. Each value is a trimmed array for that period.

{
  "2000-04-01": [ { "iso": "ARG", "name": "Argentina",
                   "localPrice": 2.5, "dollarPrice": 2.5,
                   "usdRaw": 0.11607 } ... ],
  "2026-07-01": [ ... ]
}

Country coverage grows over time — early snapshots carry far fewer countries than the current one. Do not assume every key holds the same list.

/data/bigmac.csv

19 columns, documented in full on the data download page — the same table, not repeated here.

Examples

curl

# The latest snapshot, one object per country
curl -s https://bigmacindex.app/data/countries.json

# Just Japan, with jq
curl -s https://bigmacindex.app/data/countries.json \
  | jq '.[] | select(.code == "JPN")'

# Check freshness without downloading the dataset
curl -s https://bigmacindex.app/data/bigmac-meta.json | jq '.sourcePublishedAt'

# Full history as CSV
curl -O https://bigmacindex.app/data/bigmac.csv

JavaScript fetch()

// CORS is open, so this works from any origin — no key, no proxy.
const res = await fetch('https://bigmacindex.app/data/countries.json');
if (!res.ok) throw new Error('HTTP ' + res.status);

const countries = await res.json();

const japan = countries.find((c) => c.code === 'JPN');
console.log(japan.name, japan.price_usd.toFixed(2), japan.diff_percent);
// → Japan 3.08 -50.4

// Cheapest five, by USD price
const cheapest = [...countries]
  .sort((a, b) => a.price_usd - b.price_usd)
  .slice(0, 5)
  .map((c) => `${c.flag} ${c.name}: $${c.price_usd.toFixed(2)}`);
console.log(cheapest);

Building a time series

// One country's series across every snapshot
const history = await fetch('https://bigmacindex.app/data/bigmac-history.json')
  .then((r) => r.json());

const series = Object.entries(history)
  .map(([date, rows]) => {
    const row = rows.find((r) => r.iso === 'CHE');
    return row ? { date, usd: row.dollarPrice } : null;
  })
  .filter(Boolean);

console.log(series.length + ' snapshots for Switzerland');

License & attribution

Free under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0), for personal, academic, and commercial use alike. Attribution is the only condition. If you publish a number, a chart, or an answer built on this data:

BigMacIndex.app, Big Mac Index Dataset, retrieved 2026-08-10, https://bigmacindex.app/data/

Underlying Big Mac prices come from The Economist's Big Mac Index, MIT-licensed via TheEconomist/big-mac-data. Code samples on this page are MIT.

Where the numbers come from

Source tiers, confidence scoring, how in-store prices differ from delivery-platform prices, and why the euro area is published as one aggregate — all of it is written up on the methodology page. If you are going to publish anything from these files, read it first; the EUZ row in particular is a common way to get a chart wrong.

Human-readable downloads with the same data live at /data/.