Prices in Canada 🇨🇦

In Canada, gasoline costs $1.17, beer costs $1.59 and diesel costs $1.67. That is 15 of the 16 everyday items in the game, priced in US dollars, in CAD, and as roughly how long someone on the average local wage works to buy one.

Canadian dairy sits under a supply-management system that sets production quotas and import tariffs, holding milk prices notably above US levels. Most other groceries track the US closely, which makes the dairy gap stand out in the table. Tax does not explain it: basic groceries are zero-rated for GST, so the milk premium is a production-side policy rather than something added at the till. Canada is a useful control case for exactly that reason. It shares a border, a language and most of a retail market with the US, so where the two diverge, the cause is almost always a specific Canadian policy rather than a general cost-of-living difference.

What things cost

Item	USD	Local	Work time
Big Mac	$5.54	7.7 CAD	15 min
Coca-Cola (330ml can)	$1.79	2.49 CAD	5 min
Cappuccino	$3.80	5.33 CAD	10 min
Milk (1 litre)	$2.22	3.11 CAD	6 min
Eggs (dozen)	$3.54	4.96 CAD	10 min
Apples (1 kg)	$4.11	5.76 CAD	11 min
Gasoline (1 litre)	$1.17	1.64 CAD	3 min
Diesel (1 litre)	$1.67	2.32 CAD	5 min
Electricity (100 kWh)	$12.20	16.9 CAD	33 min
Natural gas (100 kWh)	$3.50	4.8 CAD	10 min
Cigarettes (20-pack)	$9.95	13.74 CAD	27 min
Beer (330ml)	$1.59	2.19 CAD	4 min
Spirits (750ml bottle)	$23.50	32.45 CAD	64 min
Vape e-liquid (1 ml)	no data
Mobile data (1 GB)	$5.37	—	15 min
A day's healthy diet	$3.93	5.5 CAD	11 min

Most local-currency figures are printed as the source published them. The cappuccino, milk, egg, apple and petrol rows are converted from US dollars at recent exchange rates; the healthy-diet row is converted the other way. A dash means the source publishes dollars and nothing else. Work time divides the dollar price by an estimated average hourly wage, the roughest number on this page. See methodology.

How Canada compares

Relative to the rest of the game, Canada is most expensive for milk, where it ranks 4th out of 32 countries at $2.22, against a global median of $1.54.

It is relatively cheapest for electricity (100 kWh) at $12.20, which is 32nd of 48, only 16 countries in the game are cheaper.

Measured against local earnings rather than dollars, the item that takes the longest to afford here is spirits, at roughly 64 minutes of the average wage. Dollar prices and work-time prices often rank countries very differently, and that gap is usually the more interesting number.

What the state takes

Standard rate in Canada: 5% federal GST, 5–15% combined with provincial taxes. Ordinary groceries: basic groceries zero-rated. Where these come from.

Play a puzzle

Canada comes up in the daily puzzle roughly once every 49 days, paired with a different item each time. Play today's puzzle or browse the archive of past rounds.

Why a country's prices look the way they do

Canada prices: common questions

How much do everyday things cost in Canada?

Pricele publishes 15 everyday prices for Canada, each from a named source. Gasoline $1.17, Beer $1.59, Diesel $1.67. All figures are converted to US dollars so countries can be compared directly; the local-currency figure is shown alongside wherever the source published one.

What currency is used in Canada?

Canada uses the CAD. Pricele lists every price in US dollars for comparability, and shows the published local-currency figure next to it where the source gives one rather than back-converting from the dollar price.

What is the cheapest thing on Pricele's Canada list?

Of the 15 items priced for Canada, the cheapest is Gasoline at $1.17 and the most expensive is Spirits at $23.50. That is a comparison within one country's list, not a claim about value for money.

Where do Pricele's Canada prices come from?

Every row names its source and the date it was collected. They come from The Economist Big Mac Index, Jan 2026, Burger Parity, 2026, Numbeo (crowd-sourced), retrieved 2026-08, GlobalPetrolPrices.com, 17-Aug-2026, GlobalPetrolPrices.com, December 2025, WHO Global Health Observatory, tobacco tax survey 2024 (most sold brand), WHO Global Health Observatory, alcohol tax survey 2024 (most sold brand), Cable.co.uk worldwide mobile data pricing, 2023 and World Bank Food Prices for Nutrition, 2025 (converted at the World Bank official exchange rate). A pair only exists where there is a real sourced number: the table is deliberately sparse rather than padded with estimates, so a missing item usually means the item is not sold that way in Canada.