🇨🇷 Prices in Costa Rica

A Big Mac here is $6.04, cheaper than 24% of the countries we track (42nd lowest overall). Priced against local wages that is roughly 42 min of work for a single burger, a cleaner read on everyday affordability than the exchange rate alone.

A litre of gasoline costs about $1.65 in Costa Rica($6.25 per US gallon), the 111th cheapest of 170countries. Fuel prices are driven as much by tax and subsidy policy as by the oil market, which is why they vary far more between countries than crude prices ever do.

Household electricity costs about $0.170 per kilowatt-hour in Costa Rica, the 73rd cheapest of 134 countries. Like fuel, power prices are shaped heavily by how a country generates energy and whether it subsidises or taxes consumption, which is why they diverge far more than raw production costs would suggest.

Taken together, Costa Rica sits in the 27th income position of the 53countries we cover, and its prices largely track that. The headline takeaway is the one that runs through this whole site: a dollar figure only becomes meaningful once you set it against what people here actually earn. That is what the affordability numbers above are for.