Guide · 7 min read
Eight global price gaps that don't make sense until you see the income
A tour of the widest divides in our data — phones, burgers, fuel and subscriptions — and why the exchange rate is only ever half the story.
Spend enough time with global price data and you stop being surprised that things cost different amounts — and start being surprised by how much, and in which direction. Here are eight gaps from our current data that only make sense once you bring income into the picture.
1. A $385 phone gap for the identical phone
The iPhone 17 Pro runs $1,099 in United States and $1,484 in Germany. Same hardware, same box — hundreds of dollars apart, mostly tax, currency and deliberate pricing.
2. The Big Mac nearly triples in price
A Big Mac costs about $2.47 in Taiwan and $9.08 in Switzerland. A sandwich built to one recipe becomes a small luxury or a bargain depending entirely on where you order it.
3. Petrol ranges more than tenfold
A litre of gasoline is roughly $0.02 in Libya, where fuel is heavily subsidised, and about $4.06 in Hong Kong, where it is heavily taxed. Most of that difference is government policy, not the oil price.
4. Netflix Premium, four times over
The same 4K Netflix plan is $7 a month in India and $27 in United States. Pure software, priced to local wallets.
5. The US pump looks cheap — for a rich country
At around $1.11a litre, US fuel is inexpensive by developed-world standards, largely because fuel taxes are low. It is a reminder that “cheap” is often a policy choice, not a market outcome.
6. The phone that is days here and months there
Convert that iPhone into work time and the gap stops being abstract. In the most affordable country on our list it is a matter of a few days’ income; in the least, it is measured in months. The dollar price hardly moved between them.
7. A burger can cost minutes or the better part of an hour
Priced against local wages, a Big Mac swings from a handful of minutes of work in high-income countries to a serious chunk of an hour in lower-income ones — a cleaner picture of living costs than any exchange rate.
8. The pattern behind all of them
Every gap above shrinks or flips once you divide by income. That is the whole thesis of this site: the exchange rate tells you what something costs a currency, but only income tells you what it costs a person. Prices are facts; affordability is the story.
Dig into the numbers on the affordability index, the Big Mac index, or pick a country to see everything at once from the country directory.