Why There’s No McDonald’s in Iraq: The Country McDonald’s Never Entered

I set out to write this piece the way I wrote the Italy and Spain deep-dives — pick a country the Big Mac Index handles awkwardly, walk the menu boards, do the wage-per-burger math, publish. The working assumption was that Erbil, capital of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region, had quietly received the country’s first official McDonald’s sometime in 2023 or 2024. I’d seen the claim referenced offhandedly and wanted to verify.

It isn’t true. As of July 2026, there is no McDonald’s franchise anywhere in Iraq, and that includes the Kurdistan Region. Baghdad, Basra, Mosul — nothing. Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Duhok, Halabja — also nothing. The McDonald’s Corporation has never granted a public franchise license inside the country’s borders, in either Arab-controlled Iraq or Kurdish-controlled Iraq, in any decade since the Golden Arches began their global expansion. The closest thing Iraq has to a Big Mac is a burger called a “Big Mack,” served at a Sulaymaniyah restaurant named MaDonal that a Vienna-trained Kurdish cook opened in the 1990s after McDonald’s Corporate turned down his franchise application.

That fact is the whole story. It’s also a genuinely interesting Big Mac Index story — probably more interesting than another “here’s what the burger costs” walkthrough — because Iraq is one of the last substantial economies where the index literally cannot be computed from a McDonald’s menu. This piece is an editorial deep-dive on what that absence means, what the closest shadow proxies price at, and how a PPP framework should handle a country where its reference product doesn’t exist.

The short answer

There is no official Big Mac price in Iraq. Full stop.

The closest available shadow proxies:

MaDonal, Sulaymaniyah — “Big Mack” burger. Historical price (2006, per the widely-cited Toronto Globe and Mail dispatch by Marcus Gee) was around US$1.25. My editorial estimate for a 2026 comparable burger is roughly 3,500–4,500 IQD (US$2.70–3.45), based on general Kurdish food inflation and comparable independent burger shops. Confidence: very low, this is a directional read only.
Burger King, Erbil — Whopper. Iraq’s Burger King network (14+ locations, first opened Erbil November 2019) prices the Whopper in the roughly 7,000–9,000 IQD range (US$5.30–6.90 at the official rate), broadly consistent with Gulf-region Whopper pricing. Community pricing data is thin and there is no publicly-quoted per-item menu accessible from outside Iraq at time of writing.
KFC, Erbil — the actual dominant American fast-food brand in Iraq, but chicken-based, so unusable as a Big Mac proxy.

For the bigmacindex.app country grid, I’ve had to enter Iraq as a flagged, low-confidence, shadow-proxy-only data point rather than omit the country entirely. The alternative — leaving Iraq blank — is worse for a reader trying to understand the region. But no reader should mistake the MaDonal “Big Mack” price for what a McDonald’s Big Mac would cost if McDonald’s ever entered Iraq. It’s a completely different pricing physics: independent operator, no supply-chain integration, no global brand premium, no franchise fee. It’s a reference to a Big Mac, not a Big Mac.

That framing — “Iraq is a country whose Big Mac Index entry is a shadow proxy, not a Big Mac” — is what this piece is about.

The Kurdistan Regional Government and why it matters

To even talk about “Iraq” as a Big Mac Index entry, you have to grapple with the fact that Iraq is functionally two economies stapled to one flag.

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) governs three northern governorates — Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, and Duhok — plus the disputed governorate of Halabja and various contested territories along the border with Baghdad-controlled Iraq. The KRG has its own parliament, its own security forces (the Peshmerga), its own oil ministry, its own budget disputes with Baghdad, and its own foreign investment regime. It signs oil contracts independently, hosts diplomatic consulates in Erbil that operate parallel to the embassy channels in Baghdad, and runs a border regime distinct from federal Iraq at Ibrahim Khalil (Turkey), Haji Omaran (Iran), and internal checkpoints with federal Iraq.

Politically, the KRG is closer to a semi-independent statelet than a normal Iraqi province. That distinction shows up in fast food. Burger King, KFC, Hardee’s, Papa John’s, Church’s Chicken (branded locally as Texas Chicken), Cold Stone Creamery, and Subway all operate in Erbil — most of them through Kurdish or Gulf-based master franchisees, not through Baghdad-based Iraqi operators. The Middle East Eye has documented American ambassadors personally attending the ribbon-cuttings for new Burger King branches in Erbil — U.S. Ambassador Alina Romanowski opened the country’s twelfth Burger King in Erbil in March 2023, a sparkling two-story location with a play area and a koi pond, sited near Erbil International Airport.

That is what “burger diplomacy” looks like in practice. McDonald’s, notably, has not participated.

Iraq vs Kurdistan — the economic split

The IQD is a single currency. The Central Bank of Iraq in Baghdad sets the reference rate — 1,310 IQD per USD as of mid-July 2026, unchanged for months, and the IMF projects continuity at around 1,300 through the medium term. But the economic reality of a 15,000 IQD note ($11.45 at official) is meaningfully different in the two Iraqs.

KRG minimum wage (effective August 1, 2025): 450,000 IQD/month for unskilled workers, or 15,000 IQD/day for daily workers. Roughly USD 343/month, USD 11.45/day.
Federal Iraq minimum wage (unchanged since January 1, 2018 under Labour Law No. 37 of 2015): 350,000 IQD/month. Roughly USD 267/month at official rate. In practice, informal-sector enforcement is patchy.
Average gross salary (nationwide): approximately 900,000–1,050,000 IQD/month per 2026 recruiter surveys, higher in Erbil and Baghdad, materially lower in Basra and rural governorates.

Erbil salaries specifically run higher than the federal average because oil-services firms, foreign NGOs, and the U.S. and Coalition military footprint bid up wages for English-speakers and skilled workers. A mid-career Kurdish employee at a Western-facing firm can clear 2 million IQD/month (~USD 1,525). A day laborer on an Erbil construction site is on the 15,000 IQD/day floor. That spread — closer to 5x than the 2x typical of comparable emerging markets — is where the “Kurdistan is doing well by Iraqi standards” cliché comes from.

The KRG’s fiscal position, though, has been terrible. Oil exports through the Iraq-Turkey pipeline were suspended in March 2023 following an International Chamber of Commerce arbitration ruling in Baghdad’s favor, and did not restart until September 27, 2025 — roughly a 30-month closure that KRG Prime Minister estimates put at over $25 billion in direct damages and that the Association of the Petroleum Industry of Kurdistan sizes at $35 billion or more once you count broader regional effects. KRG public-sector salaries were repeatedly delayed. Unemployment in the region ran above 20% through most of that window.

That is the macro backdrop against which a Kurdish worker considers whether to spend 5,000+ IQD on a burger. It is not a country where the fast-food chains that are present feel casual.

The 30-year McDonald’s application saga

Suleiman Qassab is not a household name in Big Mac Index circles, but he probably should be.

Qassab fought in the Kurdish resistance during the 1970s, became a refugee in Vienna, and got a job as a cook at McDonald’s Austria in the 1980s. In the early 1990s — after Saddam Hussein’s regime survived the Gulf War and the UN sanctions regime hardened — Qassab applied to McDonald’s Corporation for a franchise license to open the first McDonald’s in Iraqi Kurdistan. Corporate said no. The reasons cited in the standard Wikipedia and press treatment are the UN sanctions regime, Iraq’s controlled economy under Saddam, and security. Kurdistan at that time was under Saddam-imposed internal blockade plus the international UN sanctions layered on top, and Corporate was not going to green-light a Golden Arches on top of that stack.

Qassab went ahead anyway. He opened MaDonal in Sulaymaniyah — the exterior mimics the McDonald’s mansard-roof-and-red-tile design, the interior has the same primary-color plastic chair-and-table arrangement, and the menu prints items like the “Big Mack” and “Chicken Mack” in Kurdish and English. The Toronto Globe and Mail’s 2006 dispatch In the shadow of real war, a burger war is the most detailed on-the-ground account: burgers around US$1.25, 1,000 units a day, popular with local youth and the professional middle class, open through Ramadan, and — as Qassab told the paper — free meals for U.S. forces stationed nearby, a stance that earned him both threats and celebrity status in Kurdistan.

MaDonal is still open as of the most recent public sources (Wikipedia, updated September 2025). It has never been sued by McDonald’s Corporation. As Christopher Hitchens noted, corporate lawyers “never came to Sulaymaniyah.” That absence, more than the presence of MaDonal itself, is what tells you what McDonald’s thinks of the Iraqi market.

After the 2003 U.S. invasion removed both Saddam and the UN sanctions regime, the theoretical barrier to a McDonald’s franchise dissolved. But other barriers replaced it: insurgency (2003–2011), sectarian civil war (2006–2008), the ISIS occupation and campaign (2014–2017), a suicide-bombing environment that made high-visibility Western-branded storefronts a target, and after all of that, a fragile 2018–2023 recovery that gave way to Iraq’s own political dysfunction. McDonald’s Corporation has, publicly and privately, remained silent on Iraq entry. They have not opened. They have not announced. In an April Fools’ 2023 stunt, an Iraqi food delivery app added a fake McDonald’s option to its interface; the response, as Middle East Eye reported, was thousands of Iraqis genuinely disappointed when they realized it was a joke.

MaDonal in 2026 — the shadow “Big Mack”

I could not verify a current 2026 price for the MaDonal “Big Mack” directly. The restaurant is not on major delivery apps that expose menus internationally, its Facebook presence is intermittent, and I do not have a Sulaymaniyah correspondent. Working backwards from the 2006 US$1.25 anchor, and adjusting for Kurdish food inflation and general independent-burger-shop pricing in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah in 2025–2026, my directional estimate is:

MaDonal “Big Mack” 2026: roughly 3,500–4,500 IQD (~US$2.70–3.45 at official rate)

That would be substantially cheaper than a Whopper at Erbil Burger King (~7,000–9,000 IQD) and dramatically cheaper than what a McDonald’s Big Mac prices at in comparable regional markets — Israel around USD 5.20, Turkey around USD 5.90, Saudi Arabia around USD 5.30. The gap is what you would expect for an independent operator with no franchise fee, no global supply chain, and a Kurdish rather than international meat-and-bread cost base.

This is not a Big Mac Index data point. It is a shadow proxy — a directional signal for what a purchasing-power-parity comparison might look like if the reference product existed in Iraq. Treat it that way.

Burger King in Erbil — the actual American burger

The real American burger chain in Iraq is Burger King. First Erbil branch opened November 18, 2019. Ten more branches followed across the country in 2022. The March 2023 opening of Erbil’s third branch — the country’s twelfth overall — was, per Middle East Eye, a two-story flagship near Erbil International Airport, opened personally by U.S. Ambassador Alina Romanowski. The country’s Burger King operator is a Gulf-headquartered franchise group; the master franchise for Iraq sits outside Baghdad.

Whopper pricing in Erbil is not published in a form I could verify externally at the time of writing — Burger King Iraq’s public site (burgerking.com.iq) renders a delivery interface that requires an in-country session for price loading, and the product page for the Whopper (burgerkingiraq.com/products/13822/whopper) returned an HTTP 403 to me. Community pricing signals from Tripadvisor reviews and Wanderlog listings put a two-person Burger King meal in Erbil around 16,000 IQD (~US$12.20), which brackets a standalone Whopper somewhere in the 7,000–9,000 IQD range depending on branch. That’s not cheap in Iraqi wage terms — at the Kurdish daily-worker floor of 15,000 IQD/day, a Whopper is roughly half a day’s wage. That is a materially different economic weight than a Whopper carries in Kuwait or Dubai.

The Whopper is not a Big Mac. But if the Big Mac Index needed a nearest-neighbor American-branded burger reference for Iraq, this is the one. It’s the burger a Kurdish or Iraqi consumer actually eats when they want an American-chain burger.

KFC and the “burger diplomacy” that reached Iraq without McDonald’s

Iraq’s actual dominant American fast-food brand is KFC. The colloquial word for fried chicken in Iraqi Arabic and Kurdish has become, effectively, “Kentucky” — the way “Kleenex” or “Xerox” work as generic nouns. Amir Mekhael, KFC’s Iraq representative, told Middle East Eye that “everyone here loves Kentucky. Everyone is coming to the source of the original chicken.” KFC Iraq has localized menu items — the “Rizo bowl” with boneless chicken, sweet-spicy sauce, and saffron rice — that read as a serious commitment to the Iraqi market rather than a copy-paste of the Gulf menu.

Why has KFC entered and McDonald’s has not? Three plausible reasons:

Beef vs chicken supply chains. KFC’s chicken supply localizes more cleanly through Turkish and Jordanian intermediaries than McDonald’s beef supply, which globally runs through a small number of tightly-integrated processors. Halal-certified beef at McDonald’s global standards is a harder logistics problem in Iraq than halal chicken.
Political-target exposure. McDonald’s is a bigger symbolic target for anti-American attacks than KFC, historically. The Golden Arches carry more geopolitical weight per storefront. Regional franchise operators know this.
Corporate risk appetite. McDonald’s Corporation has been notably conservative on frontier-market entry since the 2000s, preferring proven Gulf and North African markets to Iraq or Iran. KFC’s Yum Brands has been more aggressive.

Whatever the mix, the observable outcome is clear: KFC, Burger King, Papa John’s, Hardee’s, Subway, Cold Stone, and Texas Chicken are in Erbil. McDonald’s is not.

Wage-per-shadow-burger

Doing the math the way I did it for Italy and Spain, but with shadow proxies rather than a real Big Mac:

Kurdish daily-worker minimum wage: 15,000 IQD/day. Standard 8-hour day = 1,875 IQD/hour.
MaDonal “Big Mack” shadow price: ~4,000 IQD → about 128 minutes of Kurdish minimum-wage work.
Erbil Burger King Whopper: ~8,000 IQD → about 256 minutes, or 4 hours 16 minutes.
Erbil Burger King Whopper meal: ~13,000 IQD → about 416 minutes, more than a full 8-hour shift minus break.

Compare to Italy at 44 minutes for a Big Mac at CCNL floor, or Spain at similar minimum-wage math. The Kurdish daily-worker floor pays for less than half of a Whopper meal per hour. It is a materially poorer wage-per-burger position than any Big Mac Index country I’ve written up so far.

The nuance: most Erbil Burger King customers are not minimum-wage day laborers. They are the salaried professional class that clears 900,000+ IQD/month, for whom a 13,000 IQD Whopper meal is a normal Friday. That two-tier economy — Western-facing white-collar wages that eat American fast food, alongside a day-laborer floor that cannot — is what “Erbil is doing well by Iraqi standards” actually means at the burger level.

How Iraq compares to its regional neighbors

Country	McDonald’s presence	Big Mac / shadow price (USD, 2026)	Notes
Israel	Yes (~180 locations)	~$5.20	Full Big Mac Index entry
Turkey	Yes (~250 locations)	~$5.90	See Turkey market context
Saudi Arabia	Yes (~250+ locations)	~$5.30	Full Big Mac Index entry
Jordan	Yes (~50 locations)	~$5.60	Full Big Mac Index entry
Iraq (Kurdistan)	No	~$2.70–3.45 (MaDonal shadow only)	Not a valid Big Mac Index entry
Iran	No (sanctions-related)	N/A	Shadow proxies exist (Mash Donald’s etc.)
Syria	No	N/A	War/sanctions context

Iraq is in a specific cluster with Iran and Syria — sanctions-shaped, war-shaped, or politically-shaped absences of McDonald’s — that the Big Mac Index has never had a clean way of handling. The Economist’s answer historically has been to omit these countries. The bigmacindex.app methodology prefers to include them with flagged confidence and an explicit “shadow proxy” note, so that a reader looking at a regional map sees the gap rather than a blank tile that could mean “we don’t have data” or “the burger doesn’t exist” — those are different problems.

IQD official rate vs black-market rate

One further Iraq-specific wrinkle: the IQD trades at meaningfully different rates depending on which market you’re in.

Central Bank of Iraq official rate (July 2026): 1,310 IQD/USD, effectively stable, IMF-projected to hold near 1,300.
Iraqi black market / informal money-changer rate: approximately 1,537–1,538 IQD/USD per EGCurrency’s live tracker.

That’s a 17% spread between the official and informal rate. It reflects genuine difficulty accessing dollars through Iraqi commercial banks, U.S. Treasury restrictions on dollar transfers to sanctioned or high-risk Iraqi banks, and the standard emerging-market pattern of hard-currency scarcity. For a Big Mac Index computation, this matters: a 4,000 IQD MaDonal “Big Mack” is US$3.05 at the official rate but US$2.60 at the black-market rate. A meaningful chunk of the shadow-burger’s “cheap in dollars” reading disappears at the informal rate, because the informal rate is where a Kurdish worker actually converts USD-denominated remittances into local IQD spending power.

I’ve used the official rate throughout this piece for comparability with the rest of the country coverage. But readers should know the informal rate exists and would compress the USD-equivalent numbers by roughly 15%.

Historical context — sanctions, invasion, ISIS, oil closure

The reason there is no McDonald’s in Iraq is not any one factor. It is a stacked sequence of shocks over 36 years:

1990–2003: UN Security Council sanctions (Resolutions 661 and follow-ons) after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Comprehensive trade embargo. McDonald’s Corporate entry impossible.
1991–2003: Kurdish safe haven under U.S./UK air cover, but internally blockaded by Saddam and externally blockaded by the UN. MaDonal opens in this period as the local workaround.
2003: U.S. invasion removes Saddam and dissolves formal sanctions. In principle, McDonald’s could enter. In practice, insurgency begins immediately.
2003–2011: Iraqi insurgency, sectarian civil war, U.S. occupation. High-visibility Western brands remain targets. Burger King operates on U.S. military bases only.
2014–2017: ISIS controls roughly a third of Iraqi territory including Mosul. Kurdish Peshmerga hold Kurdistan. Full-country retail expansion by Western chains freezes.
2017–2019: Iraqi security stabilizes. Burger King opens first public Erbil branch November 2019. KFC and other chains follow. McDonald’s does not.
2019–2023: Iraqi political instability continues but retail environment normalizes in Erbil. Burger King expands to ~14 locations. McDonald’s still does not open.
2023–2025: KRG oil pipeline closure (March 2023 to September 27, 2025) triggers a KRG fiscal crisis; foreign retail expansion slows. McDonald’s makes no announcement.

Every window in which McDonald’s Corporate might have moved was closed by the next shock before they could act. That is a plausible reading. Another reading is that Corporate simply decided Iraq is not worth it — the fully-loaded cost of a compliant halal beef supply chain, security-hardened storefronts, and the reputational risk of being an anti-American attack target does not clear the internal ROI bar. Both readings are consistent with the observable behavior, which is: silence.

Consumer voices

The Kurdish-language and Arabic-language conversation about the absent McDonald’s is more good-natured than you might expect. From Suleiman Qassab of MaDonal, quoted in the Globe and Mail:

“I love McDonald’s. I love America.”

And from Amir Mekhael, KFC Iraq’s representative, in Middle East Eye:

“Everyone here loves Kentucky. Everyone is coming to the source of the original chicken.”

The recurring theme in every English-language Iraqi press treatment is a genuine, non-ironic Iraqi enthusiasm for American fast-food brands — undercut by frustration that McDonald’s specifically has never showed up. The April Fools’ 2023 delivery-app stunt is the tell: thousands of people ordered a fake McDonald’s option because the possibility of an actual McDonald’s in Iraq feels within reach, not absurd. It is absurd only from the Corporate side of the transaction.

Frequently asked questions

Why is there no McDonald’s in Iraq or Kurdistan?

Three overlapping reasons: 1990–2003 UN sanctions made corporate entry legally impossible; the 2003–2017 sequence of invasion, insurgency, civil war, and ISIS made it operationally too risky; and since roughly 2019, when the security environment in Erbil normalized enough that Burger King and KFC entered publicly, McDonald’s Corporation has simply declined to announce or open. The most likely underlying reason is that beef supply chains at McDonald’s global standards are harder to build in Iraq than KFC’s chicken supply, and the brand’s higher symbolic profile makes it a bigger anti-American attack target per storefront.

What is MaDonal?

An independent restaurant in Sulaymaniyah, opened in the 1990s by Suleiman Qassab — a Kurdish former resistance fighter who had worked as a cook at McDonald’s Vienna — after McDonald’s Corporation denied his franchise application. The restaurant mimics McDonald’s exterior design and menu, including a “Big Mack” burger. It has operated continuously since. McDonald’s Corporate has never sued.

How is the Kurdistan Region economically different from the rest of Iraq?

The KRG governs three governorates (Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Duhok) plus Halabja with its own parliament, budget, security forces, and foreign-investment regime. It is more open to Western brands, has a materially higher minimum wage (450,000 IQD/month vs the federal 350,000 IQD/month), and hosts nearly all the Western fast-food expansion that has happened in Iraq. Its fiscal position, however, was crippled by a roughly 30-month oil-export closure through the Iraq-Turkey pipeline from March 2023 to September 27, 2025.

How does Erbil’s Whopper price compare to regional Big Macs?

Roughly US$5.30–6.90 at the official IQD rate, which puts an Erbil Whopper in the same USD zone as Big Macs in Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. As a share of local wages, though, it is much more expensive — roughly half a day’s minimum-wage income for a Kurdish daily worker, versus a much smaller wage share in Gulf countries.

Will McDonald’s ever open in Iraq or Kurdistan?

Nobody knows. McDonald’s Corporation does not comment on unannounced markets. The realistic path would run Kurdistan-first — Erbil is where Burger King, KFC, and every other Western brand entered — but the KRG’s post-2023 fiscal crisis has slowed the pace of new Western retail commitments. A 2026 announcement would not surprise me. A continued 10-year absence would not surprise me either.

What this means for the Big Mac Index

Iraq forces a methodological question the Big Mac Index rarely confronts head-on: what do you do with a country where the reference product does not exist?

The Economist’s answer is to omit. Their published index has never carried an Iraq line. That’s clean, but it hides the fact that Iraq is a large, populous, oil-rich economy that a global PPP framework probably ought to have something to say about.

The bigmacindex.app methodology tries a middle path: publish Iraq with a shadow-proxy price, an explicit low-confidence flag, and a note that explains the entry is MaDonal or Burger-King-derived rather than an actual McDonald’s Big Mac. The reader gets a directional read on Iraqi purchasing power and a clear signal that this data point is not comparable to the Italian or French readings on the same map. That’s better than an omission that reads as missing data.

The broader lesson generalizes to Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, and every other country in the “McDonald’s-absent” cluster. For methodological limits on when PPP frameworks break down, see the PPP failure modes article. For how the rest of the 2026 country coverage handles edge cases, see the 2026 Big Mac Index complete breakdown.

Iraq is the first country in this editorial series where I’ve had to admit that the burger doesn’t exist. It won’t be the last. That admission is itself the finding — and it’s a more honest reading of what Iraqi purchasing power looks like in 2026 than any fabricated Erbil-McDonald’s price would have been.

Sources used in this article

MaDonal — Wikipedia — Sulaymaniyah restaurant background, Suleiman Qassab biography, still-open status confirmed to September 2025
Iraq: American fast food is leaving its mark two decades after the invasion — Middle East Eye — Burger King, KFC, ambassador-attended openings, April Fools’ 2023 McDonald’s stunt
Gulf and Jordanian McDonald’s restaurants seek Kurdistan Region potatoes — Kurdistan24 — confirms Corporate has never granted a public franchise in Iraq; Kurdish potatoes exported to Gulf McDonald’s supply chains instead
In the shadow of real war, a burger war — Globe and Mail (2006) — MaDonal 2006 pricing anchor, US$1.25 per burger, 1,000 units/day
Is there a McDonald’s in Iraq? — StudyCountry — confirms Corporate franchise absence in Iraq and Kurdistan
Iraqi Dinar exchange rate — Trading Economics — official rate 1,310 IQD/USD, July 15 2026
Will the Iraqi Dinar Revalue in 2026? — EBC Financial Group — CBI 1,300 target rate, IMF projection continuity
USD to IQD black market rate — EGCurrency — informal rate ~1,538 IQD/USD, 17% spread from official
Kurdistan Region minimum wage — Playroll Iraq guide — KRG 450,000 IQD/month effective August 2025, federal 350,000 IQD/month since 2018
Economy of Kurdistan Region — Wikipedia — KRG unemployment >20%, oil pipeline closure damages
Erbil and Baghdad: The Facts on Finance and Oil (2023–2025) — KRG Department of Media — official KRG framing of pipeline closure impact
Burger King Iraq — official site — Iraqi franchise network, though per-item prices not accessible externally
Salary in Erbil, Iraq — Bayt.com — Erbil white-collar salary bands

Want to see how a country with an actual McDonald’s compares? Italy, Spain, Germany, France, and the Netherlands all sit inside the eurozone with real Big Mac prices and full data confidence. Iraq is the counter-example — the country where the Big Mac Index has to admit its reference product doesn’t exist and work with shadow proxies instead. Big Mac Index data → · Methodology → · If you’re in Erbil or Sulaymaniyah and can send a MaDonal or Burger King receipt with a 2026 date, I’d genuinely appreciate it: [email protected].