Burger Index: pricing the Big Mac Index where there's no Big Mac

9 markets on our map have no McDonald's. We priced them anyway — using whatever burger people there actually buy.

If you came here for the burger index, you almost certainly mean The Economist's Big Mac Index. Same measure — same sandwich, same arithmetic. It's been running since 1986, and the name gets shortened constantly — mac index, burger index, hamburger index, McDonald's index. All the same thing. The live index sits on the front page.

Here's the part that makes the nickname better than the original, though. A Big Mac index needs a Big Mac — and in 9 of the markets we track, there isn't one.

Where the Big Mac runs out

Two different situations, and they're worth keeping apart. 6 of these markets had McDonald's and lost it. The other 3 never had one at all.

The difference matters because the leavers have a successor. When McDonald's pulled out of Russia in 2022, the restaurants didn't shut — they were sold, rebranded, and reopened selling a near-identical burger. The never-opened markets have no such lineage. What we price there is just the closest local equivalent, and we say so.

Markets that lost McDonald's

Markets that never had one

The substitutes worth knowing about

Russia — Vkusno i tochka. The strongest number on this page (85% confidence). Same buildings, same supply chain, a burger built to the same spec under a new name. That continuity is exactly why we trust the price.

Iraq — MaDonal. An imitator in Erbil, golden arches and all, selling something it calls a Big Mack. It is not a McDonald's — never has been. We price it at 25% confidence, the lowest on the page, and you should treat that row as a rough marker rather than a measurement.

Kazakhstan — I'm. That's the brand name, not a typo — the chain that took over after McDonald's left in 2023 calls itself I'm, and it sells a Double Big Burger. Supply lines to Russia were the reported sticking point, which is its own kind of answer about how these markets are wired together.

Iceland — Metro. McDonald's left in 2009 when the króna collapsed and imported ingredients stopped penciling out. The last Big Mac sold there is in a museum — genuinely, it's on display under glass. Metro took over the restaurants and sells the Heimsborgari, which is how Iceland ends up as the priciest row here at $14.21.

Why these prices don't enter the rankings

They're weaker than the official numbers — and pretending otherwise would poison the whole dataset. The Economist prices the same sandwich in every country on roughly the same day. A Whopper in Bolivia and a Heimsborgari in Iceland are not that sandwich, and they weren't sampled on that day.

So they're kept separate. On the map these markets are drawn in green — not on the price scale — they stay out of the country rankings, and every one of them carries a confidence score and a source link. Green means we worked it out; it never means The Economist said so. The full scoring rules are in our methodology, and the wider question of where we sit relative to The Economist has a page of its own.

Why publish them at all, then? Because the alternative is a map with holes in it — and holes teach you nothing. A reader planning a trip to Ulaanbaatar is better served by "roughly $4.19, and here's how we got there" than by grey emptiness.

What we're least sure about

Iraq at 25%. Also the Iran row — a combo price standing in for a standalone burger — that's a different unit, and comparing it to a single sandwich elsewhere overstates it. We've flagged it rather than quietly dropped it.

We got Iran wrong once already, in a different way. A claim about a short-lived Tabriz branch sat on this site until a reader with family there wrote in and asked for the source. There wasn't one. The whole chain traced back to newspapers citing each other. That correction is written up in full, including what we should have checked.

If you've bought a burger recently in any of these 9 markets, a photo of the menu board is worth more to us than another hour of desk research. Prices and how to send them are on the contact page.

The cheapest row on this page is Russia at $2.55 — about 5.6× cheaper than Iceland. Neither country sells a Big Mac. The index still works.