Guide · 5 min read
Days of income: a fairer way to compare prices across countries
A dollar price hides the thing that matters most — how much of your life it costs. This is the method behind every number on PricesAbroad.
Every headline on PricesAbroad rests on one small idea: a price means nothing until you know what it costs the person paying it. A number like $1,099is not “expensive” or “cheap” on its own. It is expensive relative to a wage. So instead of stopping at the dollar figure, we translate it into time.
The formula, in one line
We take a country’s average income and work out what one day of it is worth, then divide the price by that. Concretely: days of income = price in USD ÷ (annual income ÷ 365). Income comes from the World Bank’s GNI per capita, a figure published on a consistent basis for almost every country, which is what makes the comparison fair.
A worked example
The iPhone 17 Pro costs $1,099 in the United States, where average income is about $88,810 a year. One day of that income is roughly $243, so the phone is about 4.5 days of work. In India the same phone is $1,414 — barely different in dollars — but average income is about $2,760 a year. Run the same division and it becomes roughly 6.1 months of work. Identical product, near-identical price, a completely different sacrifice.
Three units, for three kinds of purchase
One measure doesn’t fit everything, so we use three. For a big one-off buy like a phone we show days of income. For a cheap everyday item like a Big Mac we show minutes of work, using an hourly wage derived from a standard 2,080-hour work year. And for a monthly subscription we show it as a share of one month’s income, because that is how the cost actually recurs. The unit changes; the principle doesn’t.
What it can and can't tell you
Average income is exactly that — an average. In a very unequal country the typical person earns less than the mean, so the real burden for most people is even heavier than our figure suggests. We would rather understate that than pretend precision we don’t have. Used honestly, days of income won’t tell you what to buy, but it will tell you something a price tag never can: how much of a life a thing costs.
See it applied across every country on the affordability index, or read the full methodology and sources.