🇵🇭 Prices in Philippines

A Big Mac here is $2.84, cheaper than 91% of the countries we track (5th lowest overall). Priced against local wages that is roughly 1.2 hrs of work for a single burger, a cleaner read on everyday affordability than the exchange rate alone.

A litre of gasoline costs about $1.19 in Philippines($4.49 per US gallon), the 50th 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 $0.209 per kilowatt-hour in Philippines, the 89th 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, Philippines sits in the 46th 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.