The Economist published the Big Mac Index twice in 2025 — once in January, once in July. In the July 2025 release the burger cost CHF 7.20 in Switzerland and IDR 42,000 in Indonesia, which came out to $8.99 and $2.58 at the survey’s own exchange rates. That’s the full spread across 54 markets, and I’ve put both releases into one table below that you can select and paste straight into a spreadsheet.
I pulled these out of the raw CSV I keep for this site — 45 releases, 2,056 rows, April 2000 through July 2026. Every number below comes from that file, not from a screenshot of somebody’s chart.
But before the table, the question that shows up in my search logs more than any other.
Which edition you’re actually looking at
Not 2025. The current edition is July 2026, published on 29 July 2026, and the source file is literally named big-mac-full-index-jul-26.csv.
Here’s the cadence, because it isn’t obvious from the outside. The Economist has run the index on a steady twice-a-year schedule since January 2018 — one January release, one July release, eighteen in a row. Most carry a data date of the 1st; July 2019 is dated the 9th and January 2020 the 14th, which is worth knowing if you’re joining these files on the date column. Before 2018 the timing wandered: April 2000, May 2004, June 2005, then two releases in 2006 dated January and May. So if you’re reading a page dated 2025, you’re one full year and two releases behind.
Why does anyone get confused? Because The Economist keeps the same URL for the Big Mac Index and quietly swaps the data underneath it, while the raw CSVs on GitHub keep their per-release filenames. The article looks eternal. The data isn’t.
The US benchmark moved like this across the four releases that matter here: $5.79 in January 2025, $6.01 in July 2025, $6.12 in January 2026, $6.22 in July 2026. Every “vs US” percentage you’ll read anywhere is measured against whichever of those four numbers the author happened to have. Mix the vintages and the comparison is garbage.
Both 2025 releases, all 54 markets
Sorted by July 2025 dollar price, highest first. Local prices are bare numbers with the currency code in its own column — that’s deliberate, so Excel doesn’t turn the column into text the moment you paste it. “vs US” is the July 2025 raw over- or undervaluation against the $6.01 American burger.
| Country | Cur | Jan local | Jan USD | Jul local | Jul USD | vs US |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Switzerland | CHF | 7.2 | 7.99 | 7.2 | 8.99 | +49.6% |
| Uruguay | UYU | 299 | 6.91 | 315 | 7.79 | +29.6% |
| Norway | NOK | 75 | 6.67 | 75 | 7.34 | +22.1% |
| Sweden | SEK | 62 | 5.67 | 71 | 7.32 | +21.8% |
| Denmark | DKK | 39 | 5.49 | 45 | 7.00 | +16.6% |
| Euro area | EUR | 5.67 | 5.95 | 5.96 | 6.92 | +15.2% |
| Britain | GBP | 4.59 | 5.73 | 5.09 | 6.82 | +13.5% |
| United States | USD | 5.79 | 5.79 | 6.01 | 6.01 | +0.0% |
| Costa Rica | CRC | 2,990 | 5.90 | 2,990 | 5.95 | −1.0% |
| Israel | ILS | 17 | 4.71 | 20 | 5.94 | −1.1% |
| Poland | PLN | 20.9 | 5.21 | 21.3 | 5.81 | −3.4% |
| Colombia | COP | 21,900 | 5.17 | 22,900 | 5.70 | −5.2% |
| Turkey | TRY | 190 | 5.32 | 225 | 5.59 | −6.9% |
| Canada | CAD | 7.81 | 5.43 | 7.5 | 5.47 | −9.0% |
| Singapore | SGD | 6.95 | 5.17 | 6.95 | 5.41 | −10.0% |
| Lebanon | LBP | 480,000 | 5.36 | 480,000 | 5.36 | −10.8% |
| Mexico | MXN | 95 | 4.60 | 99 | 5.28 | −12.2% |
| Australia | AUD | 7.75 | 4.87 | 8 | 5.22 | −13.2% |
| United Arab Emirates | AED | 18 | 4.90 | 19 | 5.17 | −13.9% |
| Czech Republic | CZK | 109 | 4.56 | 109 | 5.13 | −14.6% |
| Argentina | ARS | 7,300 | 6.95 | 6,600 | 5.13 | −14.6% |
| New Zealand | NZD | 8.4 | 4.77 | 8.6 | 5.12 | −14.8% |
| Saudi Arabia | SAR | 19 | 5.07 | 19 | 5.07 | −15.7% |
| Bahrain | BHD | 1.7 | 4.51 | 1.8 | 4.77 | −20.6% |
| Peru | PEN | 16.9 | 4.53 | 16.9 | 4.74 | −21.2% |
| Qatar | QAR | 15 | 4.12 | 17 | 4.67 | −22.3% |
| Chile | CLP | 4,490 | 4.55 | 4,490 | 4.65 | −22.6% |
| Nicaragua | NIO | 164 | 4.48 | 169 | 4.61 | −23.2% |
| Kuwait | KWD | 1.4 | 4.54 | 1.4 | 4.58 | −23.8% |
| Hungary | HUF | 1,420 | 3.65 | 1,540 | 4.47 | −25.7% |
| Brazil | BRL | 23.9 | 4.03 | 23.9 | 4.30 | −28.4% |
| Honduras | HNL | 105 | 4.12 | 112 | 4.27 | −29.0% |
| Venezuela | VES | 252 | 4.45 | 487 | 4.21 | −30.0% |
| Thailand | THB | 135 | 4.01 | 135 | 4.17 | −30.7% |
| Moldova | MDL | 65 | 3.52 | 70 | 4.16 | −30.8% |
| Guatemala | GTQ | 31 | 4.01 | 31 | 4.04 | −32.7% |
| South Korea | KRW | 5,500 | 3.84 | 5,500 | 3.98 | −33.7% |
| Oman | OMR | 1.53 | 3.97 | 1.526 | 3.96 | −34.0% |
| Romania | RON | 16.25 | 3.43 | 16.95 | 3.88 | −35.5% |
| Azerbaijan | AZN | 6.24 | 3.67 | 6.46 | 3.80 | −36.8% |
| Pakistan | PKR | 1,050 | 3.77 | 1,080 | 3.79 | −36.9% |
| China | CNY | 25.5 | 3.52 | 25.5 | 3.55 | −40.9% |
| Jordan | JOD | 2.5 | 3.53 | 2.5 | 3.53 | −41.3% |
| Japan | JPY | 480 | 3.11 | 480 | 3.23 | −46.3% |
| Malaysia | MYR | 13.15 | 3.00 | 13.55 | 3.19 | −46.9% |
| Hong Kong | HKD | 24 | 3.08 | 25 | 3.18 | −47.0% |
| Ukraine | UAH | 120 | 2.86 | 132 | 3.16 | −47.5% |
| South Africa | ZAR | 51.9 | 2.78 | 53.9 | 3.01 | −49.8% |
| Philippines | PHP | 169 | 2.89 | 169 | 2.98 | −50.4% |
| Vietnam | VND | 76,000 | 3.03 | 76,000 | 2.91 | −51.6% |
| Taiwan | TWD | 78 | 2.38 | 78 | 2.66 | −55.7% |
| India | INR | 226 | 2.62 | 225.75 | 2.63 | −56.2% |
| Indonesia | IDR | 41,000 | 2.54 | 42,000 | 2.58 | −57.0% |
| Egypt | EGP | 135 | 2.69 | 125 | 2.53 | −57.9% |
Seven of the 53 non-US entries sat above the United States in July 2025 — Switzerland, Uruguay, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Britain, and the euro area as a bloc. Forty-six sat below. The median burger across the whole index was $4.63 — about 77% of the American price, which tells you the dollar was strong against most of the world and not much else.
The reversal nobody wrote up
The biggest single move inside 2025 wasn’t Switzerland or Norway. It was Argentina, and it went the wrong way.
In January 2025 Argentina’s Big Mac cost ARS 7,300, converted at 1,050 pesos to the dollar — $6.95, or 20.1% above the US. Argentina had the second-priciest burger on Earth that month, behind Switzerland and ahead of Uruguay. Six months later the same sandwich was ARS 6,600 at 1,286 pesos — $5.13, or 14.6% below the US.
That’s a swing of 34.7 percentage points in six months, the largest in the dataset for either 2025 release. And look at what produced it: McDonald’s Argentina cut the nominal price, from 7,300 to 6,600 pesos, a 9.6% reduction. In a country with the inflation history Argentina has. I don’t have a sourced explanation for that cut and I’m not going to invent one — but a nominal price cut in Argentina is rare enough that it’s worth flagging as an open question rather than smoothing over.
The peso did the rest, losing 18.4% of its dollar value across the same window.
At the other end, Sweden gained 23.9 points between the two 2025 releases — SEK 62 to SEK 71 on the menu, plus a krona that gained 12.7%. Denmark gained 21.8. Israel gained 17.4, on a menu that went from ILS 17 to ILS 20.
Splitting the dollar price in two
Now the part this site can do that a chart of the index can’t.
A Big Mac’s dollar price is exactly two numbers dividing into each other: the local menu price, and the exchange rate. The Economist’s CSV ships both — local_price and dollar_ex — so any change in the dollar price decomposes cleanly:
dollar price = local price ÷ exchange rate
Take logs and the change becomes additive. Whatever the dollar price did, some of it came from the menu board and the rest came from the currency market, and you can put a number on each. No modelling, no assumptions — it’s arithmetic on two columns.
So here are the ten markets whose standing against the US moved most between July 2025 and July 2026, with the split. “Menu” is the change in local-currency price. “Currency” is what the local currency did against the dollar — positive means it strengthened, which pushes the dollar price up all by itself.
| Country | Jul 2025 | Jul 2026 | Menu | Currency | Driver |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Colombia | 5.70 | 8.00 | +13.1% | +24.2% | currency |
| Israel | 5.94 | 7.67 | +15.0% | +12.2% | menu |
| Turkey | 5.59 | 6.91 | +44.4% | −14.5% | menu |
| Uruguay | 7.79 | 8.94 | +14.0% | +0.7% | menu |
| Costa Rica | 5.95 | 7.00 | +5.4% | +11.6% | currency |
| Mexico | 5.28 | 6.27 | +10.1% | +7.9% | menu |
| Honduras | 4.27 | 5.19 | +24.1% | −1.9% | menu |
| Hungary | 4.47 | 5.30 | +7.8% | +10.0% | currency |
| Argentina | 5.13 | 5.91 | +31.8% | −12.7% | menu |
| Chile | 4.65 | 5.41 | +11.1% | +4.6% | menu |
Same direction, opposite engines
Colombia and Turkey both got more expensive in dollars. They did it by opposite mechanisms, and the table above is the only place you’ll see that stated as a number.
Colombia — COP 22,900 to COP 25,900. Menu up 13.1%. Peso up 24.2% against the dollar, from 4,017.86 to 3,236.28 per dollar. Dollar price $5.70 to $8.00. So is the Colombian burger expensive because McDonald’s raised prices or because the peso got strong? Mostly the peso — it accounts for about 64% of the move, with the menu doing the other 36%. Colombia’s official daily rate is published by Banco de la República — worth knowing that it won’t match the index to the decimal, because The Economist takes its rates from Refinitiv Datastream, not from central banks.
Turkey — TRY 225 to TRY 325. Menu up 44.4%. Lira down 14.5% against the dollar. Dollar price $5.59 to $6.91. The currency was pushing the dollar price down the entire year and the burger still got 23.5% more expensive to a foreigner, because domestic prices outran the slide. Roughly 70% of Turkey’s move is menu. The lira series is at the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye and the consumer price series at TurkStat.
Two countries, both climbing the same ranking, for reasons that have nothing to do with each other. A traveller feels both as “Turkey got expensive” and “Colombia got expensive.” A Colombian didn’t feel a 40% increase — they felt 13%. A Turk felt 44%.
Israel is the third pattern, the boring one where both forces push the same way: menu up 15.0% (ILS 20 to ILS 23), shekel up 12.2%, and the two just compound. Bank of Israel’s statistics carry the currency half.
Where six months lies to you
This is the finding I didn’t expect, and it partly argues with something on this site already.
We published a July 2026 update that ran the same menu-versus-currency split over the January-to-July 2026 window. Its headline stat: in 21 of 54 markets the local price didn’t move by a single unit. Not a peso, not a baht. That’s accurate for that window.
Run it over a full year — July 2025 to July 2026 — and only 13 markets kept the menu price identical. Eight countries look frozen at six months and aren’t:
Australia — A$7.75, A$8.00, A$8.50, A$8.50. Switzerland. Czech Republic. Denmark. Hungary. Mexico. Oman. Singapore.
Each of them raised the price once during the year, in whichever half you happened not to be looking at. Menu prices are lumpy — a franchisee reprices once a year, maybe twice — while exchange rates move every second the market is open. So any window shorter than a full repricing cycle systematically hands credit to the currency, because the currency is the only thing guaranteed to have moved.
刻舟求剑 — carve a notch in the boat to mark where the sword fell overboard, then look for it under the notch after the boat has drifted. The notch isn’t wrong. It’s just not attached to the thing you care about.
Now the part where I have to give some of that back. I expected the aggregate attribution to shift too, and it doesn’t. Weighting every market equally and dropping Argentina and Venezuela as hyperinflation outliers, the menu accounts for 57.9% of total movement over the six-month window and 57.9% over the twelve-month window. Identical to one decimal place. The split at the level of “how much of world Big Mac price movement is menus versus money” is stable. What breaks is the country-level verdict — and if you’re pricing a product for Australia or writing about Mexico, the country-level verdict is the only one you’re using.
Colombia shows it cleanly when you cut the year in half. July 2025 to January 2026: menu flat at COP 22,900, peso up 9.0%, dollar price $5.70 to $6.21 — 100% currency. January to July 2026: menu up 13.1%, peso up 13.9% — an even split. Read only the first half and Colombia is a pure currency story. Read only the second and it’s half a pricing story. Read the year and it’s 64/36.
What A$8.50 buys where I live
I’m in Australia, so let me put my own currency on the table.
The index says A$8.50 in July 2026, converting at 1.4287 to $5.95 — 4.3% below the US burger. In July 2025 it was A$8.00 at 1.5339, or $5.22, and 13.2% below. Australia closed 8.9 points of the gap in a year without anything dramatic happening: the menu went up 6.3%, the Australian dollar went up 7.4%. Almost dead even. The RBA publishes the daily rates if you want to follow the Australian dollar between releases.
And here’s my own mistake, because it’s the exact error this article is about. When the July 2026 release landed and Australia showed up on that list of 21 markets with no price change, my first read was “right, nothing happened here.” Nothing happened in the second half. The A$0.50 increase — from A$8.00 to A$8.50 — landed in the January 2026 release, and I’d already forgotten it. I was looking at my own country, with the receipt in my own wallet, and the short window still fooled me.
That A$0.50 matters more to me than the currency does, for a boring reason. I sell software, and pricing an app by country means picking a local price tier and then living with it for a year or more while the exchange rate wanders. Menu prices and app price tiers behave the same way — sticky, discrete, revisited on a human schedule. Currency doesn’t wait for you. The Big Mac Index is one of the few public datasets where you can watch both clocks at once.
Where I’d argue with myself
Three things I’d push back on if someone handed me this article.
The decomposition is exact but the interpretation isn’t. Menu price and exchange rate aren’t independent — a currency collapse causes the menu increase that follows it, usually with a lag of months. Turkey’s 44.4% menu jump is partly the lira’s earlier slide arriving at the counter. Calling that “menu-driven” is true as accounting and misleading as economics. I’ve kept the label because the arithmetic is what I can verify.
Fifty-four markets is not the world. There’s no Nigeria, no Kenya, no Bangladesh — the index skews toward countries with liquid currencies and a McDonald’s, which is a selection bias baked in from 1986. For a serious price-level comparison the OECD’s PPP data covers far more ground with far more items, and it’s the grown-up version of what the burger gestures at.
And the “vs US” column is a comparison to a single American price — one number, supplied by McDonald’s directly. That’s a change worth knowing about: until July 2022 the US figure was an average of four major American cities, and The Economist swapped it for a company-provided price in the same release that changed how the GDP-adjusted index is built. Both changes are documented in the repo’s methodology notes. So the denominator under every percentage in this article is one price standing in for an entire economy. It works because a Big Mac is unusually standardised, and it stops working the moment you ask a question the sandwich can’t answer — which we’ve written about in where the Big Mac Index breaks down.
The January release will be the interesting one
Watch Colombia. The peso has now driven the burger from $5.17 in January 2025 to $8.00 in July 2026 — the fourth most expensive in the world, above Israel, closing on Norway. Menu prices in Colombia have moved 18.3% across that whole stretch. Almost everything else was the currency.
If the peso holds and McDonald’s Colombia repeats an increase the size of the last one — 13.1% — that’s COP 29,293, or about $9.05 — past Uruguay’s $8.94 and dead level with Switzerland’s $9.04, which has topped this index for as long as most readers have been looking at it. If the peso weakens 20% from here, Colombia drops back to about $6.67 with the menu untouched, and the ranking looks like nothing ever happened.
The burger will be the same burger either way. Live figures for every market are on the Colombia page and the Turkey page, the whole 45-release archive is on the data page, and how we build these numbers is written out in full.
碗里的东西没变, 变的是秤.