🇺🇸 Prices in United States

An iPhone 17 Pro costs $1,099 in United States. That ranks 1st cheapest of the 12 Apple storefronts we track. Against an average income of $88,810 a year, it works out to about 4.5 days of income — the figure that tells you what the phone really costs someone living in United States, not just what the sticker says.

A Big Mac here is $6.12, cheaper than 22% of the countries we track (43rd lowest overall). Priced against local wages that is roughly 9 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 $27 a month (about 0.4% of a month's average income), and Spotify Premium is $13. 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 $1.11 in United States($4.19 per US gallon), the 38th 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 $0.188 per kilowatt-hour in United States, the 84th 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, United States sits in the 3rd 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.