CHF 7.30. That’s the Swiss Big Mac in the July 2026 edition of the index — $9.04 at the edition’s own rate of 0.807 francs to the dollar, and the highest dollar price on Earth.
It’s also the exact number the January 2026 edition printed. I went into the CSV expecting a country that had been raising prices hard for a decade — that’s the shape the headline suggests. That isn’t what’s there. Between June 2008 and July 2022 the Swiss Big Mac cost CHF 6.50 — one price, fourteen years, one blip. The American Big Mac changed price seventeen times over the same stretch.
So the world’s most expensive burger is also one of the world’s least-repriced burgers. Switzerland didn’t climb to the top of this table. It got carried there, by the franc, while the menu board stood still.
A menu that barely moves
Here is the full Swiss series since January 2021, which is the window I use for repricing frequency because it’s the one the stickiness piece uses — eleven intervals across twelve readings.
| Edition | CHF | USD | CHF per USD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 2021 | 6.50 | $7.29 | 0.892 |
| Jul 2021 | 6.50 | $7.04 | 0.923 |
| Jan 2022 | 6.50 | $6.98 | 0.931 |
| Jul 2022 | 6.50 | $6.71 | 0.968 |
| Jan 2023 | 6.70 | $7.26 | 0.923 |
| Jul 2023 | 6.70 | $7.73 | 0.867 |
| Jan 2024 | 7.10 | $8.17 | 0.869 |
| Jul 2024 | 7.10 | $8.07 | 0.880 |
| Jan 2025 | 7.20 | $7.99 | 0.901 |
| Jul 2025 | 7.20 | $8.99 | 0.801 |
| Jan 2026 | 7.30 | $9.08 | 0.804 |
| Jul 2026 | 7.30 | $9.04 | 0.807 |
Four changes in eleven editions. Now look at where they land — January 2023, January 2024, January 2025, January 2026. Every single one is a January reading. In this whole window no July edition has ever caught McDonald’s Switzerland with a new price — about as clean a signal of an annual repricing calendar as twice-yearly sampling can give you.
Four out of eleven puts Switzerland in the bottom fifth of the index for repricing frequency — the median country moved six times, the mean 6.6. The countries sitting next to Switzerland on that list are Vietnam, Jordan, the Philippines and Kuwait — not company a high-wage European economy usually keeps.
The cumulative number is the one that should stop you. Switzerland’s Big Mac is up 12.3% in francs since January 2021. The United States is up 27.2% over the same eleven editions, across ten separate price changes. Australia, where I live, is up 31.2%. The euro area is up 46%. Among the fifty-one countries with a complete series back to January 2021, only Thailand, Taiwan, Jordan and Brazil raised prices less than Switzerland did — and among countries with GDP per person above $40,000, only Taiwan.
The fourteen-year price
Now widen the window. This is where it gets strange.
The Swiss Big Mac cost CHF 6.50 in June 2008. It still cost CHF 6.50 in July 2022. Every reading in between says 6.50 except one — July 2014, which prints CHF 6.16, and I’d treat that as a promotional or sampling artefact rather than a genuine cut, since it snaps straight back to 6.50 in the next reading. Before that run, the price was CHF 6.30 from 2001 through 2007. Seven years. Then fourteen years. Then a slow four-step walk up to 7.30.
Over the full series the arithmetic is almost hard to believe. April 2000 to July 2026:
- Switzerland — CHF 5.90 to CHF 7.30. +23.7% in twenty-six years.
- United States — $2.24 to $6.22. +177.7%.
- Australia — A$2.59 to A$8.50. +228.2%.
That’s roughly 0.8% a year of menu inflation in Switzerland against about 4% in the US. A Swiss twenty-year-old buying a Big Mac today is paying 24% more than their parents did at the same age — in the same money, from the same chain, off a menu that looks broadly the same. Almost nowhere else in this dataset is that sentence true.
The franc did the work
So did McDonald’s Switzerland engineer the world’s most expensive burger? No. Take the cleanest single case in the table above — January 2025 to July 2025. The menu price didn’t move: CHF 7.20 both times. The dollar price went from $7.99 to $8.99. That’s +12.5% in six months from a menu that nobody touched, because the franc went from 0.901 to 0.801 against the dollar and 12.5% is exactly what that move is worth.
The longer decomposition works the same way. From the July 2022 trough to now, the Swiss dollar price rose 34.7%, from $6.71 to $9.04. The menu contributed 12.3 points of that. The franc contributed the remaining 20 — 0.968 francs to the dollar became 0.807 — and the burger got more expensive for everyone outside Switzerland without getting more expensive for anyone inside it.
Here’s my favourite version of it. In July 2011, at the height of the franc panic that pushed the Swiss National Bank into capping the currency, the Swiss Big Mac cost CHF 6.50 and $8.06 — a raw overvaluation against the dollar of +121.5%, still the wildest reading this index has ever produced for a rich country. Today it costs CHF 7.30 and $9.04, a raw overvaluation of +45.4%. The franc, meanwhile, sits at 0.807 to the dollar against 0.806 fifteen years ago. Within two tenths of a percent — fifteen years, round trip.
So over fifteen years the dollar price rose 12.1% and the menu rose 12.3%. The currency contributed nothing net — it just took an enormous detour, and the raw overvaluation number collapsed from +121.5% to +45.4% with no help from the franc at all. That collapse is entirely American: the US Big Mac went from $3.64 to $6.22 while Switzerland was reprinting its menu four times.
Reading the Swiss burger off the menu board and concluding something about Swiss inflation is 刻舟求剑 — carving a notch in the side of a moving boat to mark where you dropped your sword. The notch is real. The boat moved.
This edition makes the same point in miniature. Switzerland’s raw overvaluation fell from +48.4% in January to +45.4% in July, a three-point drop, and it isn’t because anything happened in Zurich. The franc actually weakened slightly — 0.804 to 0.807, the wrong direction for this story. The whole three points came from the American price going $6.12 to $6.22, which the July 2026 edition writeup covers as the quiet fact behind most of this edition’s movement. Switzerland was one of the 21 countries whose local price didn’t change by a single unit. It’s still the most expensive burger in the index — by 10 cents.
That margin deserves saying out loud. Uruguay is at $8.94 — second, and breathing on it. Switzerland’s world number one is a 1.16% lead over a country most people would never guess is in the conversation, and one bad week for the franc erases it.
Where the adjustment lands
Now the part where I give ground. The headline I’d like to write isn’t true.
Switzerland is not the world’s most overvalued currency by the Big Mac Index. Not on the measure that economists actually use. The Economist’s GDP-adjusted index regresses dollar price against GDP per person — rich countries should have expensive burgers, so the raw number systematically flatters poor countries — and on that basis Switzerland finishes third.
| Country | Dollar price | Raw vs USD | GDP per person | GDP-adjusted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Uruguay | $8.94 | +43.7% | $17,473 | +77.4% |
| Colombia | $8.00 | +28.7% | $8,393 | +63.6% |
| Switzerland | $9.04 | +45.4% | $81,901 | +48.5% |
| Turkey | $6.91 | +11.1% | $14,053 | +38.7% |
| Costa Rica | $7.00 | +12.5% | $19,051 | +38.1% |
| Israel | $7.67 | +23.3% | $56,323 | +35.2% |
| Norway | $8.05 | +29.5% | $78,314 | +33.6% |
| Britain | $7.40 | +19.0% | $49,528 | +33.1% |
| Euro area | $7.08 | +13.8% | $44,687 | +29.1% |
Uruguay and Colombia beat Switzerland on the adjusted measure and it isn’t close — 77.4% and 63.6% against 48.5%. That’s not a rounding argument. That’s a different tier. If you see “Switzerland has the world’s most overvalued currency” written anywhere — including on a chart I might have drawn myself in a hurry — that’s the raw index talking. The honest sentence is: Switzerland is first in the world on raw dollar price, first in the world on raw overvaluation, third in the world once you adjust for income, and first in Europe on both.
But the adjusted number contains something genuinely odd that the raw one doesn’t, and it’s worth slowing down for. Switzerland’s raw overvaluation is +45.4%. Its adjusted overvaluation is higher, at +48.5%. Adjusting for income is supposed to forgive rich countries — it made Switzerland look worse.
The reason is sitting in the GDP column. The index puts Swiss GDP per person at $81,900.76 and American GDP per person at $89,991 — the US is richer per head. So the regression line predicts a Swiss burger at $6.10, which is below the actual American price of $6.22. The model expects Switzerland to be slightly cheaper than the United States, and it is 45% more expensive instead. The adjustment doesn’t help; it removes the excuse.
Norway is the control group that makes this land. GDP per person $78,314, within 4.4% of Switzerland’s. Same region, same cold, same wage structure — same reputation for punishing the visiting wallet. Norway’s burger is $8.05. Switzerland’s is $9.04 — 12.3% more, on a 4.4% income difference. Adjusted, Norway is +33.6% and Switzerland is +48.5%. Fifteen points of overvaluation separate two countries that look like each other in every column except the one that matters.
And unlike the euro area row directly beneath it, the Swiss number isn’t hiding anything. I’ve argued at length that the EUZ aggregate is a fiction — one row averaging a 25% spread between Spain and France, an undervalued German anchor and an overvalued southern periphery, none of which correspond to a real menu board. Switzerland is the opposite case, and it’s why this country is a better PPP data point than most. One currency, one country, one central bank, one price. There’s no aggregation to blame. If you want to check the conversion arithmetic yourself, the calculator runs on this same July 2026 table, and the methodology page documents how the adjusted series is built.
Pricing an app for Switzerland
Here I stop being a man reading a spreadsheet.
I sell a drawing app. In Switzerland it’s priced at CHF 4.00. In the United States the same app is $5.99. At this edition’s 0.807 francs to the dollar, the Swiss price is about $4.95 — roughly 17% below what an American pays for the identical download.
Sit that next to the burger. In Switzerland the Big Mac costs 45.4% more than in America — my app costs 17% less. Same two countries, same week, two verdicts pointing in opposite directions, and the distance between them is a factor of 1.76.
That’s awkward, because I built an App Store pricing advisor on this site that takes a US base price and applies the Big Mac ratio to it. (Yes — this is me pointing at my own tool, which is the honest thing to admit before I disagree with it.) Feed it $5.99 and Switzerland’s +45.4%, and it tells me to charge about CHF 7.03. Which is, to within four percent, the price of the burger. My app and a Big Mac — same number — and I’ve priced myself at 57% of it.
So who’s wrong? I keep going back and forth. What follows is the reasoning, not a verdict — I haven’t settled it.
The strongest argument against the burger is that the two products aren’t the same kind of thing at all. A Big Mac in Zurich is made in Zurich — Swiss rent, Swiss wages, Swiss beef, Swiss electricity, every input priced in francs by people who live there. That’s most of the reason it costs CHF 7.30. My app has none of that. The second copy costs me nothing — the thousandth copy costs me nothing — and no part of my cost structure knows or cares that the buyer is Swiss. The burger price is a measurement of Swiss production costs wearing a PPP costume. Purchasing power parity is a theory about tradeable goods, and a hamburger is famously the least tradeable good anyone ever built an index on.
The second thing pulling my price down is volume, and here I need to be careful about what I disclose. All sales figures on this site are indexed, US = 100, because the absolute numbers are a revenue split between me and a partner and those aren’t mine to publish. On that scale Switzerland came in under one — not a low number, a fractional one. When a market is that small, the question stops being “what’s the optimal price” and becomes “is there any price here that changes my year.” Probably not. So I default to the friendly number and stop thinking about it.
The third reason is the least intellectual and possibly the most decisive. Apple’s price tiers aren’t a continuous line — you pick a rung, not a number. CHF 4.00 is a rung, and a comfortable one. The PPP-correct CHF 7.03 isn’t obviously one, and the nearby rungs jump past it. A lot of what looks like deliberate international pricing strategy across the App Store is developers picking whichever rung was closest and moving on, and I’d be lying if I said I was immune to that.
Am I leaving money on the table? Honestly, I don’t know. A Swiss buyer looking at CHF 4.00 for something that costs them slightly more than half a Big Mac is not being asked a hard question, and there’s a version of this where I’ve been quietly underpricing the richest market in Europe for two years out of pure inertia. What I’m more confident about is the narrower claim: the Big Mac ratio is a bad instrument for digital goods in exactly the countries where it’s most extreme, because the extremity is coming from local production costs I don’t have. It works best in the middle of the table, which is a deeply unsatisfying thing to discover about a tool you built.
What it costs in Australian dollars
I don’t live in Switzerland or America, which turns out to be an advantage here. I’m in Australia, and the Australian dollar is the closest thing this edition has to a neutral measuring stick — raw overvaluation −4.3%, GDP-adjusted −0.5%. Set aside the United States, which is zero by construction, and only the Czech Republic and Hungary sit closer to fair value. Standing on the AUD is about as close to standing on nothing as you can get.
So let me convert the Swiss burger into money I actually hold.
| Edition | Swiss burger | AUD per USD | Swiss burger in AUD | Australian burger | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 2025 | $8.99 | 1.534 | A$13.79 | A$8.00 | 1.72× |
| Jan 2026 | $9.08 | 1.493 | A$13.56 | A$8.50 | 1.60× |
| Jul 2026 | $9.04 | 1.429 | A$12.92 | A$8.50 | 1.52× |
A Big Mac in Zurich costs me A$12.92 against A$8.50 at home — 52% more, roughly a full extra burger for every two I buy. That’s the headline an Australian should care about, and it’s noticeably less brutal than the 72% premium of a year ago.
Now watch the same six months from three seats. Same burger. Three answers.
A Swiss customer saw CHF 7.30 in January and CHF 7.30 in July — nothing happened. An American saw $9.08 become $9.04, a 0.5% drop, near enough to nothing as well. An Australian saw A$13.56 become A$12.92 — the Swiss Big Mac got 4.7% cheaper, and over the full year from July 2025 it’s down 6.3% in Australian dollars while going up 1.4% in francs.
Nobody involved is wrong. The Swiss shop didn’t change a thing, and neither did the Australian one — A$8.50 in both editions — since Australia sat on the same list of 21 unchanged countries as Switzerland. Two frozen menus, two countries doing nothing, and the gap between them still moved five percent in half a year. That movement lives entirely in the AUD, which went 1.493 to 1.429 against the dollar.
This is the thing the index is actually for, and it’s easy to miss when you only ever hold one currency. A price is a relationship between three things — a menu, a wallet and a rate — and if you only ever stand in one country you can’t see which of the three moved. The Swiss can’t see it — their menu has been the stillest object in this dataset for eighteen years. The Americans can’t quite see it either, because the dollar is the denominator and denominators feel like standing still by construction. You need a third currency, preferably a boring one, and the Australian dollar spent this edition being magnificently boring.
Which leaves me with an uncomfortable thought about my own price page. The burger I can’t arbitrage — I’d have to fly there. The app I can. I set that price myself, in a currency I don’t hold, for a market I’ve never visited, on a rung of Apple’s ladder I picked in about forty seconds — and then never looked at again. The Swiss Big Mac has been repriced four times in eleven editions and I’ve repriced my app zero times in that span. Between McDonald’s Switzerland and me, only one of us is disciplined about this, and it turns out that CHF 7.30 was never the number I should have been staring at.
以不变应万变.
All figures from the July 2026 edition of The Economist’s Big Mac Index, the same table behind the Switzerland country page and the calculator. Local prices, exchange rates, GDP per person and the GDP-adjusted series are the index’s own; the five-year and twenty-six-year cumulative figures, the repricing counts and the AUD conversions are my arithmetic on top of it. Next edition lands in January 2027, which — going by the last four changes — is when the Swiss menu is due to move again.