Pricele #85: Cigarettes (20-pack) in Turkey 🇹🇷
The puzzle for 23 September 2026 asked what a pack of 20 cigarettes costs in Turkey. Here is the answer and the context behind it.
The answer
Cigarettes (20-pack) · Turkey
$2.21
73 TRY
About 33 minutes of the average local wage buys a pack of 20 cigarettes.
Cheaper than 77% of the 49 countries in the game.
Source: WHO Global Health Observatory, tobacco tax survey 2024 (most sold brand).
About cigarettes
No other item in the game is this deliberately priced. Tobacco taxes are set to make cigarettes unaffordable, and the WHO tracks the result precisely because it is a policy instrument rather than a market outcome. Australia's pack costs more than thirty times Lebanon's, and the same manufacturers sell in both.
Where Turkey sits
Of the 49 countries priced for cigarettes, Turkey ranks #38 from the top at $2.21, 52% below the median of $4.58.
Turkey has run high inflation for several years, so lira prices climb quickly while the currency falls against the dollar. The two roughly offset, which keeps Turkish dollar prices low but makes any single reading unusually time-sensitive. KDV is 20% standard with reduced bands of 10% and 1% covering most food, and those bands have themselves been moved repeatedly during the inflation of recent years. Turkey is the country in this table where the collection date matters most after Argentina: the figures are not wrong so much as perishable.
What else costs what in Turkey
| Item | USD | Local | Work time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Big Mac | $5.90 | 255 TRY | 89 min |
| Coca-Cola (330ml can) | $0.95 | 35 TRY | 14 min |
| Cappuccino | $3.60 | 171.17 TRY | 54 min |
| Milk (1 litre) | $1.02 | 48.5 TRY | 15 min |
| Eggs (dozen) | $2.13 | 101.28 TRY | 32 min |
| Apples (1 kg) | $1.80 | 85.59 TRY | 27 min |
| Gasoline (1 litre) | $1.30 | 61.81 TRY | 20 min |
| Diesel (1 litre) | $1.66 | 79.68 TRY | 25 min |
| Electricity (100 kWh) | $5.80 | 280 TRY | 87 min |
| Natural gas (100 kWh) | $2.00 | 93.7 TRY | 30 min |
| Beer (330ml) | $2.36 | 78 TRY | 35 min |
| Spirits (750ml bottle) | $31.76 | 1,050 TRY | 7.9 h |
| Mobile data (1 GB) | $0.44 | — | 7 min |
| A day's healthy diet | $1.91 | 75.44 TRY | 29 min |
Go deeper
See the full table for cigarettes in every country or everything priced in Turkey.