🇯🇵 Prices in Japan

An iPhone 17 Pro costs $1,114 in Japan, 1% more than the United States. That ranks 2nd cheapest of the 12 Apple storefronts we track. Against an average income of $38,340 a year, it works out to about 10.6 days of income — the figure that tells you what the phone really costs someone living in Japan, not just what the sticker says.

A Big Mac here is $3.03, cheaper than 87% of the countries we track (7th lowest overall). Priced against local wages that is roughly 10 min of work for a single burger, a cleaner read on everyday affordability than the exchange rate alone.

On subscriptions, Netflix's Premium plan runs $14 a month (about 0.4% of a month's average income). Streaming services localise their pricing aggressively, so what looks cheap on the invoice can still be a real monthly commitment where incomes are lower — and a rounding error where they are high.

A litre of gasoline costs about $1.04 in Japan($3.95 per US gallon), the 33rd 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 $0.227 per kilowatt-hour in Japan, the 99th 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, Japan sits in the 17th 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.