A Big Mac in Britain costs £5.49 in the July 2026 edition of the Big Mac Index. At that edition’s rate of 0.74187 pounds to the dollar, it’s $7.40 — 19.0% above the $6.22 American burger, and 5.2% above Denmark’s $7.04.
Denmark. I want to sit on that one for a second, because I’ve been setting App Store prices across these markets for two years, and Denmark is the country I file mentally under rich enough to charge whatever you like. Britain’s GDP per capita in this dataset is $49,528. Denmark’s is $68,986 — 28% higher. Britain charges more anyway.
That’s the whole article in one line. Every other expensive country in northern Europe is expensive because it’s rich. Switzerland’s burger is $9.04 on $81,901 of income per head. Norway’s is $8.05 on $78,314. Those are countries where the price and the paycheque moved together. Britain is the one where they came apart — and the index has a column that measures exactly how far apart.
The rest of this is the arithmetic, plus the one section where I stop quoting the dataset and tell you what happened when I priced my own product into this market and got it wrong.
Five years of steady raises
Here is Britain’s local-currency price across the eleven index editions since January 2021 — the same window the price stickiness piece uses.
| Edition | Price | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 2021 | £3.29 | — |
| Jul 2021 | £3.49 | +6.1% |
| Jan 2022 | £3.59 | +2.9% |
| Jul 2022 | £3.69 | +2.8% |
| Jan 2023 | £3.79 | +2.7% |
| Jul 2023 | £4.19 | +10.6% |
| Jan 2024 | £4.49 | +7.2% |
| Jul 2024 | £4.59 | +2.2% |
| Jan 2025 | £4.59 | flat |
| Jul 2025 | £5.09 | +10.9% |
| Jan 2026 | £5.29 | +3.9% |
| Jul 2026 | £5.49 | +3.8% |
Ten raises in eleven editions. One flat window — the first half of 2024, and that’s the only one. Cumulatively that’s +66.9% in five and a half years.
Put that against the neighbours over the identical window. Switzerland: +12.3% — and it moved the price only four times out of eleven. Sweden: +30.5%. Norway: +50.0%. Denmark: +53.3%. The euro area: +45.7%. The United States: +27.2%. Britain raised the most of any of them, and it did it the same way America did — small, frequent, almost boring steps — except each British step was bigger.
That combination is rare. The stickiness piece splits the world into countries that reprice constantly and countries that sit still for years then jump. Only eight countries in the whole index changed price in ten or more of the eleven editions — Argentina, Turkey, Uruguay, the euro area, Chile, Britain, Sweden and the United States. Of those, Britain is the only rich, low-inflation market whose cumulative rise is anywhere near 67%. Sweden matched Britain on frequency and came out at half the total.
I’ll say plainly that the stickiness article should have had Britain in its “most frequent” table and didn’t — 10 out of 11 changes and +67% cumulative belongs next to the US line, not in a footnote. That’s my omission, not the data’s.
What does 67% over five years actually mean? It means a British customer has watched a Big Mac go from under three-fifty to over five-fifty — inside a single parliament. Nothing dramatic ever happened on the menu board. There was no single hike anyone could get angry about — the biggest was 10.9%, in July 2025. The price just kept climbing, twice a year, in twenty and thirty pence steps, and the accumulation did the work.
Britain’s expensiveness isn’t a currency story. It’s an escalator.
Rich prices, mid-tier income
The Big Mac Index publishes two numbers per country, and Britain is the clearest case I’ve found of why you need both.
The raw index compares the burger price directly. Britain: +19.0% against the dollar. Read literally, sterling is 19% overvalued — the burger implies an exchange rate of 0.883 pounds per dollar, the market says 0.742.
The adjusted index does something else — it regresses burger price on GDP per capita first, then asks how far the country sits from its own income line. Britain: +33.1%.
The distance between those two readings is 14.1 percentage points. That is the number this article is about.
Here’s what it means in words. Sterling being strong explains 19 points of Britain’s expensiveness. But once you account for the fact that Britain is a middling-income rich country rather than a top-tier one, the burger looks more out of line, not less. Britain isn’t expensive because the pound is high relative to its fundamentals. It’s expensive because British prices have outrun British incomes.
Now the honest part. I sat down expecting to write that Britain has the widest raw-to-adjusted gap of the nine non-euro European countries in the index. It doesn’t — Poland’s gap is 19.3 points and Hungary’s is 14.7, both wider.
| Country | Raw | Adjusted | Gap | GDP per capita |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Poland | -0.0% | +19.3% | 19.3 | $28,239 |
| Hungary | -14.8% | -0.2% | 14.7 | $33,882 |
| Britain | +19.0% | +33.1% | 14.1 | $49,528 |
| Czech Republic | -12.6% | -0.1% | 12.5 | $42,226 |
| Sweden | +15.1% | +26.6% | 11.4 | $55,474 |
| Romania | -35.6% | -24.6% | 11.0 | $34,386 |
| Denmark | +13.1% | +19.7% | 6.6 | $68,986 |
| Norway | +29.5% | +33.6% | 4.1 | $78,314 |
| Switzerland | +45.4% | +48.5% | 3.1 | $81,901 |
Look at the two countries above Britain, though. Poland’s raw reading is exactly zero and Hungary’s is negative fifteen. Their gaps come from the poor end — the burger looks cheap on a currency-converter and turns out to be dear once you price it against a Polish or Hungarian salary. That’s the ordinary shape of this statistic — every low-income country in the index has a positive gap for the same reason.
Britain’s gap runs the other direction. Among the countries where the burger is already visibly expensive in raw dollar terms — Switzerland, Norway, Britain, Sweden, Denmark — Britain’s 14.1 points is the widest by a distance. Sweden is next at 11.4. Switzerland — the most expensive burger on earth — has a gap of 3.1, because Swiss income justifies Swiss prices almost perfectly.
So the corrected claim, which is the one I’ll stand behind: Britain has the widest raw-to-adjusted gap of any country in the index whose burger is already dear in dollars. Expensive and not commensurately rich is a combination almost nobody else in the dataset manages.
Two comparisons make it concrete.
Against the Czech Republic. Britain’s GDP per capita is 17.3% higher. Britain’s burger is 36.2% more expensive ($7.40 versus $5.43). The price gap is more than double the income gap. Czechia’s adjusted reading is -0.1% — the Czech burger sits almost exactly on its income line — and Britain sits 33 points above it.
Against Denmark. Britain’s GDP per capita is 28.2% lower. Britain’s burger is 5.2% more expensive. That is the sentence I keep coming back to — a country a quarter poorer, charging more.
You can run any pair you like on the calculator, and the full British series with sources lives on the UK country page.
Britain against the euro area
Sterling versus the euro is the comparison most British readers actually want, so here it is. Against the euro, the British burger is +4.5% — £5.49 against the euro area’s €6.19, both converted at July 2026 rates. Nearly nothing — on the raw index the two look like the same economy.
They aren’t. Britain’s GDP per capita is 10.8% above the euro-area figure of $44,687, while the burger is only 4.5% dearer. On raw numbers Britain looks like a slightly-richer, slightly-pricier version of the continent.
The adjusted readings break that. The euro area’s is +29.1%, Britain’s +33.1% — and the euro area’s own internals are the problem. Its raw-to-adjusted gap is 15.3 points, wider than Britain’s 14.1.
That comparison isn’t fair, and the reason it isn’t fair is the point of the eurozone aggregate article. “EUZ” is one row averaging twenty economies whose burger prices span a 25% range and whose incomes span far more than that. A gap computed on that average is a gap between two fictions. Regressing a made-up average price on a made-up average income produces a residual that belongs to no menu board anywhere.
Britain’s 14.1 points is one country, one currency, one national menu, one national income statistic. It’s a smaller number and a real one. A wide gap on an aggregate tells you the aggregate is badly constructed. A wide gap on a country tells you something about the country.
There’s also a Brexit-shaped question sitting under this that I’m not going to pretend the burger can answer. Britain’s cumulative +66.9% since January 2021 covers the post-2020 trade-friction period, the 2022 energy shock, and a labour market that lost a chunk of its EU-national workforce. All three plausibly show up in a burger price. Which one dominates, this dataset genuinely cannot say — one product, two observations a year, no cost breakdown, no counterfactual. The methodology page is explicit about what this index can and can’t carry.
Why the UK is not a discount market
This is the section I actually wanted to write — and it’s about my own money, not McDonald’s.
I sell a drawing app. It’s priced $5.99 in the United States and £5.99 in the United Kingdom — same digits, different symbol, and that was roughly the depth of the thinking. The UK tier is the most expensive price I charge anywhere on earth once you convert to dollars — at the July 2026 edition’s rate, £5.99 comes to $8.07.
The industry convention runs the other way. Standard App Store advice is to price Britain so the net matches America — UK list prices are shown VAT-inclusive at 20%, while US prices are shown before whatever sales tax your state bolts on at the till. Matching $5.99 net means £4.44, and £4.44 plus VAT is £5.33. Round that to an available tier and the convention hands you £4.99. I charged £5.99.
Strip the VAT back off my £5.99 and I book £4.99, about $6.73 — 12.3% above what an American buyer generates. On the ledger I’m not gouging anyone. On the shelf — which is the only place a customer ever looks — a British buyer sees a number 35% larger than an American one does.
And the refund rate in the UK is the highest of any market I sell in. The US refund rate is zero.
Before anyone builds a theory on that: I’m not publishing unit counts or refund counts. Those numbers are split with a partner and they aren’t mine alone to put on the internet. What I can say is that the British denominator is small — small enough that a handful of refunds moves the rate by several points — and that this is an anecdote, not evidence. If you took my UK refund rate to a statistician they’d laugh you out of the room, and they’d be right to. Price and refunds are correlated in my data. I cannot show you causation and I’m not going to claim it.
There’s published work pointing the same direction, and I want to be careful about how much weight I put on it. Luca and Reshef, in Management Science in 2021, found that when restaurants raised prices, ratings fell — a 1% price increase associated with roughly a 3–5% drop in ratings (DOI 10.1287/mnsc.2021.4049). That’s restaurants on a review platform, not software on a storefront. Refunds aren’t ratings, and the mechanism might not transfer at all. It’s a direction, not a result, and my own sample cannot support the claim it points toward.
What I can do is show you what the index would have told me if I’d read the right column.
The raw index says the British burger is 19.0% dearer than the American one. Take that at face value and burger-parity for a $5.99 app is $7.13 — about £5.29 at the July 2026 rate. So three methods give three answers: the VAT convention says £4.99, the raw burger says £5.29, and Apple’s tier grid has neither. It has £4.99, and it has £5.99. The choice was 5.6% below burger-parity or 13.3% above it. 削足适履 — trim the foot to fit the shoe. I trimmed upward.
But the raw index was the wrong column. The adjusted reading is +33.1%, and what that number is telling you is not charge more in Britain. It’s telling you British shelf prices already sit a third above where British incomes place them. The country is stretched. A market where everything already costs more than the paycheques justify is a market where the marginal pound of your price lands on someone who is out of slack — not one who has 33% of headroom waiting for you.
Did I know that when I set the tier? No. I looked at a currency converter, saw a strong pound, and rounded up. That’s the whole sophistication of the decision — and it took me two years and a refund rate to notice what I’d skipped.
The general version, which is why the App Store Pricing Advisor uses the adjusted figures rather than the raw ones: the raw index tells you what your price converts to. The adjusted index tells you what it feels like. For most countries those two point the same way and it doesn’t matter which you use. For Britain they diverge by 14 points — and 14 points is the width of an App Store tier.
Britain is not a discount market. It’s also not the premium market a currency converter makes it look like. It’s the awkward third thing — rich-country prices on mid-tier income, sold to customers who have been riding that escalator for five years and are out of patience for it.
What the Australian dollar saw
I live in Australia, so here’s the reading from this side of the planet.
A Big Mac in Australia is A$8.50, and it’s been A$8.50 all year — Australia is one of the 21 countries that didn’t move a single unit of local currency between the January and July editions, per the July 2026 update. Converted at the edition’s cross rate, the British burger is A$10.57. That’s 24.4% more than I pay at home.
The interesting bit is what happened over the six months. In January the British burger was £5.29 — A$10.57. In July it’s £5.49 — A$10.57.
Nought point nought three percent, in AUD terms, across half a year. McDonald’s raised the price 3.8% in sterling, and sterling gave back 3.6% against the Australian dollar over the same window, and the two cancelled to within a rounding error.
I checked the other eight non-euro European countries for the same effect and Britain is alone in it. Sweden’s burger fell 5.6% in AUD terms, Denmark’s fell 5.7%, Switzerland’s fell 4.7%, Czechia’s fell 5.4%. Norway went up 2.6%, Hungary up 1.5%, the euro area down 2.7%, the US down 2.7%. Britain is the only one where an Australian wallet felt nothing at all — which is a nice demonstration that “the price went up” and “it costs more” are separate questions with separate answers depending on which currency you’re holding.
Where this number breaks
The usual caveats, and one specific to Britain.
McDonald’s UK sets prices centrally but franchisees can and do vary them, and the app runs near-permanent discounting that a headline menu price never captures. The £5.49 in the index is a list price — and a meaningful share of British customers haven’t paid list price for a Big Mac in years. That pushes the effective British price down, and I have no clean way to quantify by how much.
The GDP-per-capita figure driving the adjusted reading is one number for a country with severe regional dispersion — London’s output per head is roughly double the north-east’s. A national adjusted index of +33.1% averages across regions that would each read very differently on their own — which is exactly the objection this site raises about the euro-area row.
And the index is two observations a year on one product. A price that looks like a smooth escalator across eleven editions could have moved and moved back inside any six-month window.
The thing I can’t shake is how quietly it happened. There was never a British Big Mac scandal. No single hike big enough to make the papers, no boycott, no viral receipt. Twenty pence in January, twenty pence in July — ten and a half years of that and you’d have a ten-pound burger.
I set my own price the same way — one rounding-up decision, ninety seconds of thought, two years before it showed up as anything I could see. Nobody’s is a scandal either. 温水煮青蛙.
Data: The Economist Big Mac Index, July 2026 edition, via bigmacindex.app. Prices are local-currency list prices; dollar conversions use the edition’s own exchange rates. Britain’s full series is on the UK country page, and the calculator will run any pair in the dataset.