Big Mac Index Calculator
Enter an amount and pick two countries. The calculator converts it twice — once at today's market exchange rate, once at the rate Big Mac prices imply — and shows how many burgers each amount actually buys.
The same measure also goes by the mac index, the McDonald's index, the hamburger index and the burger index. The Economist has published it since 1986.
Where the PPP rate comes from
Dividing one country's burger price by another's gives an exchange rate: the rate at which a Big Mac would cost the same in both places. In the July 2026 survey a Big Mac is $6.22 in the United States and ¥500 in Japan, so burger parity sits at ¥80.39 per $1. The market was trading at ¥162.13 — roughly 50.4% weaker than parity implies, which is the sense in which the JPY is called undervalued.
Nothing is modelled, weighted or smoothed — it is division on two published prices, and the calculator above runs it across the 59 countries where we have a burger price, against exchange rates refreshed daily.
Reading the four outputs
- At market exchange — what a bank or a card network would actually hand you today.
- At Big Mac PPP rate — what you would get if the burger cost the same in both countries. This is the theoretical figure, not a rate anyone will trade at.
- PPP gap — the distance between those two. Positive means the destination currency is expensive relative to burger parity; negative means it is cheap, and your money goes further than the market rate alone suggests.
- Big Macs — the same comparison without any currency at all: how many burgers the amount buys on each side, at local shelf prices.
One caveat worth stating plainly: this is a long-run mean-reversion signal, not a timing tool. Currencies that look deeply undervalued tend to close the gap over years, and often never fully close it — labour and rent are cheaper in poorer countries, and no amount of arbitrage moves a restaurant. The limits of the Big Mac Index goes through the failure modes. The prices here are in-store recommended prices, not delivery-app markups.
Where the prices come from
Burger prices come from The Economist's Big Mac Index, which is published twice a year, plus our own research for markets it leaves out — the euro-area countries it reports as a single aggregate. Exchange rates are refreshed daily, so the gap moves between surveys even when the prices do not. The methodology page sets out the arithmetic and how each source is bounded; the full dataset is downloadable.
Your amount and both countries are written into the address bar as you change them, so the link in your browser always reproduces the comparison on screen.
