The Big Mac Index in chart form. Switzerland sits at the top — its franc-priced burger converts to about $11.36, the most expensive in the world. South Africa sits at the bottom at $4.09. Same beef patty, same sesame bun, same cheese — different price tags. The gap is what the index is measuring.
The default sort is by USD-equivalent price, descending — the form most people mean when they say "the Big Mac Index ranking." But the toggle above lets you reorder by PPP valuation (overvalued vs. undervalued vs. the dollar) instead, which is the index's actual signal. Two different lenses on the same data.
Same sandwich. Different prices. The gap is the signal.
How to read this ranking
Each row shows: rank, country flag + name, currency code, a colored bar sized to the USD price, the price itself, and the PPP valuation (% over- or undervalued vs the dollar). The bar color reflects the PPP signal, not the price magnitude — so a country can have a tall bar (expensive in dollars) but be colored green if its currency is undervalued by another measure. Switzerland is the canonical case: tall red bar, deep red fill — expensive AND overvalued.
The most useful comparisons are within a sort, not across them. Sorting by USD price tells you where the burger costs most in absolute terms; sorting by PPP tells you where the currency is most mispriced relative to the dollar. The two rankings are correlated but not identical — Switzerland tops both, but Argentina and Turkey are dramatically rearranged depending on which lens you use.
Why a bar chart instead of a map
The world map at /big-mac-prices-by-country shows you where the prices are. This page shows you how they rank. Both are the same data; bars just expose magnitude differences more cleanly than choropleth shading. Switzerland's $11.36 burger looks 3× South Africa's $4.09 in a bar chart in a way it doesn't on a map (where both countries are just colored differently).
For year-over-year analysis, the editorial pillar at Big Mac vs. CPI compares the burger to official inflation indexes — and shows where CPI smoothing has diverged from real-world basket prices in the same countries that appear here.
Data and methodology
Prices are scraped daily from public McDonald's menus and food-delivery platforms (Uber Eats, Glovo, Grubhub) across multiple cities per country. The country-level price is the median across all sampled cities. Local-currency prices are converted to USD at live exchange rates from major FX feeds.
The PPP valuation column shows (local USD price ÷ US USD price) − 1, expressed as a percentage. Positive = local burger costs more than US benchmark = currency overvalued vs the dollar per the Big Mac Index. Negative = local burger is cheaper = undervalued. We currently track 9+ countries with daily updates — coverage is growing. For the full per-country detail, see the homepage table or the per-country pages at /country/{slug}.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Big Mac Index ranking in 2026?
The Big Mac Index ranking compares the USD-equivalent price of a Big Mac across every tracked country, ordered from most expensive to cheapest. As of 2026, Switzerland tops the ranking at approximately $11.36 per Big Mac, while South Africa sits at the bottom at about $4.09. Countries in between reflect a combination of real wages, local rent, and currency strength against the dollar.
Which country has the most expensive Big Mac?
Switzerland has the most expensive Big Mac among tracked countries, currently around
$11.36 USD-equivalent (CHF 8.90). The Swiss franc is the strongest major currency vs the burger benchmark — overvalued by ~50% per the Big Mac Index. The price reflects high Swiss real wages and SNB monetary discipline rather than currency mispricing. See the
Switzerland country page for daily detail.
Which country has the cheapest Big Mac?
Among tracked countries, South Africa has the cheapest Big Mac at about $4.09 (ZAR 68.30) — undervalued by ~45% per the Big Mac Index. Other low-USD-price countries include Japan (yen weakness), Indonesia, and India (where the burger uses chicken and is called the Maharaja Mac).
How is the Big Mac Index ranking calculated?
We collect actual menu prices from McDonald's locations and food-delivery platforms (Uber Eats, Glovo, Grubhub) across multiple cities per country, updated daily. Local-currency prices are converted to USD at live exchange rates. The country price is the median across all sampled cities. The ranking sorts these prices, while the PPP valuation column shows how much over- or undervalued the local currency is vs the US dollar. Read the full
methodology.
How does this ranking differ from The Economist's Big Mac Index?
The Economist publishes the Big Mac Index twice a year by surveying McDonald's locations once. We update daily by scraping public menus continuously. Our ranking reflects today's prices and live FX rates, while The Economist's reflects whatever the survey caught at publication time. Both rank the same set of countries; the differences are coverage breadth and update frequency.
Does a high USD-price always mean overvalued?
Not always. A high USD-equivalent Big Mac price can reflect strong real wages and expensive non-tradeable inputs (like Swiss rent and labor), not pure currency overvaluation. The PPP valuation column accounts for this by comparing prices to the US baseline. Use the local-price-only sort to compare like-for-like against the local economy, and the PPP-sort to compare currency mispricing across countries.
How often is the ranking updated?
Every day. The ranking is rebuilt from live API data each time the page loads, plus a static fallback (pre-rendered at build time) so search engines can index the data even if JavaScript is not running. The static fallback is regenerated on every deploy.
