🇷🇴 Prices in Romania

A Big Mac here is $3.98, cheaper than 67% of the countries we track (18th lowest overall). Priced against local wages that is roughly 25 min of work for a single burger, a cleaner read on everyday affordability than the exchange rate alone.

A litre of gasoline costs about $1.90 in Romania($7.20 per US gallon), the 139th 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 $0.222 per kilowatt-hour in Romania, the 97th 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, Romania sits in the 25th 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.