The Economist published the July 2026 edition of the Big Mac Index on 29 July. We have updated the live index, all 54 country pages, and the downloadable dataset to the new figures.
This is the first entry in a running series: every six months, when a new edition lands, we will break down what moved and why. Consider this the January-to-July 2026 report.
The headline: the burger barely changed. The money did.
Here is the statistic that frames everything else.
In 21 of the 54 countries in the index, the local-currency price of a Big Mac did not change by a single unit between January and July 2026. Not a peso, not a baht, not a franc.
Australia · Bahrain · Brazil · Czech Republic · Denmark · Hungary · Jordan · Kuwait · Lebanon · Mexico · Oman · Pakistan · Peru · Philippines · Saudi Arabia · Singapore · Switzerland · Taiwan · Thailand · UAE · Vietnam
And yet in dollar terms, those same countries moved — Thailand fell 6.6%, Denmark fell 1.5%, Hungary climbed four places in the ranking. Nothing happened at the counter. Everything happened in the currency market.
This is the whole point of the Big Mac Index, and it is the part most coverage skips. The index is not really a food price tracker. It is a currency tracker that happens to use a hamburger as its measuring stick — a good stick precisely because a Big Mac is close to the same product everywhere.
The US benchmark makes the point cleanly: the American Big Mac went from $6.12 to $6.22, up just 1.6%. Almost every large move you are about to read is a currency move measured against a nearly stationary yardstick.
The five biggest dollar-price gains
| Country | Jan 2026 | Jul 2026 | Change | Local price | Exchange rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🇨🇴 Colombia | $6.21 | $8.00 | +28.8% | +13.1% | −12.2% |
| 🇮🇱 Israel | $6.36 | $7.67 | +20.5% | +15.0% | −4.6% |
| 🇹🇷 Turkey | $5.90 | $6.91 | +17.1% | +27.5% | +8.9% |
| 🇨🇷 Costa Rica | $6.04 | $7.00 | +15.8% | +5.4% | −9.0% |
| 🇻🇪 Venezuela | $4.04 | $4.51 | +11.4% | +138.5% | +114.0% |
Read the last two columns together — that is where the story lives.
Colombia is now the fourth most expensive Big Mac on Earth, ahead of Israel and closing on Norway. But Colombians did not see a 29% menu increase; they saw 13%. The other 16 points came from a strengthening peso. A stronger currency makes everything in that country look more expensive to a visitor holding dollars — which is exactly what “overvalued currency” means in Big Mac Index language.
Turkey is the opposite mechanism. Local prices rose 27.5% — real, felt, domestic inflation — but the lira also weakened 8.9%, absorbing part of the shock. Turks paid a lot more; tourists paid somewhat more.
Venezuela is the extreme case and the best teaching example in the whole dataset. The local price rose 138.5% in six months. The exchange rate moved 114% in the same direction. Net effect on the dollar price: +11.4%. The index quietly performs the translation that makes hyperinflation comparable to everywhere else — which is precisely the job it was invented for.
Southeast Asia got cheaper without cutting a single price
The clearest cluster in this edition is Southeast and South Asia. (Asia as a whole did not move together — China, Malaysia, Korea and Japan all rose. We break that split down in part 4 of this series.)
| Country | Jan 2026 | Jul 2026 | Change | Local price change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🇹🇭 Thailand | $4.30 | $4.02 | −6.6% | 0.0% |
| 🇮🇩 Indonesia | $2.52 | $2.38 | −5.4% | +1.2% |
| 🇵🇭 Philippines | $2.84 | $2.74 | −3.6% | 0.0% |
| 🇮🇳 India | $2.51 | $2.45 | −2.4% | +4.1% |
| 🇹🇼 Taiwan | $2.47 | $2.42 | −1.9% | 0.0% |
Thailand, the Philippines and Taiwan did not change their menu prices at all. The dollar simply bought more baht, more pesos and more New Taiwan dollars in July than it did in January. For an American traveller, this corner of Asia got 2–7% cheaper in six months without anyone lowering a price.
Indonesia is now the cheapest Big Mac in the index at $2.38, taking the title from Taiwan.
The new rankings
Most expensive
- 🇨🇭 Switzerland — $9.04
- 🇺🇾 Uruguay — $8.94
- 🇳🇴 Norway — $8.05
- 🇨🇴 Colombia — $8.00
- 🇮🇱 Israel — $7.67
Cheapest
- 🇮🇩 Indonesia — $2.38
- 🇹🇼 Taiwan — $2.42
- 🇮🇳 India — $2.45
- 🇵🇭 Philippines — $2.74
- 🇪🇬 Egypt — $2.87
Only 12 of 54 countries now sit above the US price of $6.22. The other 42 currencies are, in Big Mac terms, undervalued against the dollar.
Biggest ranking moves: Colombia ↑6, Hungary ↑4, Poland ↓5, Denmark ↓4, Saudi Arabia ↓4.
Egypt: where a reader caught something the index cannot
Egypt’s official July figure is E£145, up 16% in local terms from January’s E£125 — one of the larger local-currency increases in the dataset.
While we were preparing this update, a reader in Egypt emailed us to say the McDonald’s Egypt delivery menu was showing E£170, not E£145.
Both numbers can be right. The Economist samples prices at a fixed point in time so that all 54 countries are measured on the same day; a menu board reflects today. In a country running high inflation, several months of drift between the two is expected — and the size of that gap is itself a useful signal.
We kept E£145 as the index figure to preserve cross-country comparability, and added an editorial note on the Egypt page recording the E£170 observation. The full story is in An Egyptian reader emailed us.
What this edition is good for
If you are using this data, three practical takeaways:
- Do not read dollar-price changes as food inflation. In this edition most of them are currency moves. Check the local-price column before drawing conclusions.
- The US benchmark was nearly flat, so relative rankings are unusually clean this round — the yardstick barely moved.
- Six months is long enough for high-inflation countries to drift. For Turkey, Egypt, Venezuela and Argentina, treat the index as a floor rather than a live price.
The rest of this series
Three deeper pieces on what this edition turned up:
- Colombia now has the world’s 4th most expensive Big Mac — it was 37th four years ago. The peso is back at its 2019 level while the local price doubled.
- Thailand changed its price once in five years. Argentina changed it eleven times. — why 21 flat countries is normal, and what the exceptions reveal.
- Asia did not get cheaper. Half of Asia did. — a 13-point spread inside a region that averaged −0.1%.
Explore the updated data yourself on the interactive index, the full country rankings, or download the raw dataset. Background reading: the complete 2026 breakdown and why PPP theory has limits.
Source: The Economist Big Mac Index, July 2026 edition
(big-mac-full-index-jul-26.csv, published 29 July 2026). Exchange rates as sampled by The
Economist on 1 July 2026. Local prices as listed above are the Economist’s survey figures.