Prices in China 🇨🇳

In China, mobile data costs $0.38, coca-cola costs $0.48 and beer costs $0.54. That is 15 of the 16 everyday items in the game, priced in US dollars, in CNY, and as roughly how long someone on the average local wage works to buy one.

Chinese prices vary enormously between tier-one cities and smaller ones, so a single national figure hides a wide spread. Imported and branded goods carry a premium; domestically produced staples are among the cheapest in the game. VAT is banded rather than flat, at 13%, 9% or 6% depending on category, with food and agricultural products at 9%, which means the tax wedge itself differs between two items in the same basket. Read the Chinese column as an urban average with a wide error bar around it, not as a price any particular shopper pays.

What things cost

Item	USD	Local	Work time
Big Mac	$3.66	25.5 CNY	40 min
Coca-Cola (330ml can)	$0.48	3.5 CNY	5 min
Cappuccino	$2.96	20.04 CNY	32 min
Milk (1 litre)	$1.79	12.12 CNY	20 min
Eggs (dozen)	$1.58	10.69 CNY	17 min
Apples (1 kg)	$1.83	12.39 CNY	20 min
Gasoline (1 litre)	$1.24	8.39 CNY	14 min
Diesel (1 litre)	$1.10	7.44 CNY	12 min
Electricity (100 kWh)	hidden, in play right now
Natural gas (100 kWh)	$5.10	34.7 CNY	56 min
Cigarettes (20-pack)	$2.49	17.99 CNY	27 min
Beer (330ml)	$0.54	3.89 CNY	6 min
Spirits (750ml bottle)	$3.32	24 CNY	36 min
Vape e-liquid (1 ml)	no data
Mobile data (1 GB)	$0.38	—	4 min
A day's healthy diet	$1.75	12.6 CNY	19 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 China compares

Relative to the rest of the game, China is most expensive for milk, where it ranks 7th out of 32 countries at $1.79, against a global median of $1.54.

It is relatively cheapest for diesel at $1.10, which is 40th of 49, only 9 countries in the game are cheaper.

Measured against local earnings rather than dollars, the item that takes the longest to afford here is natural gas (100 kWh), at roughly 56 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 China: 13%, 9% or 6% by category. Ordinary groceries: 9% on agricultural and food products. Where these come from.

Play a puzzle

China 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

China prices: common questions

How much do everyday things cost in China?

Pricele publishes 14 everyday prices for China, each from a named source. Mobile data $0.38, Coca-Cola $0.48, Beer $0.54. 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 China?

China uses the CNY. 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 China list?

Of the 14 items priced for China, the cheapest is Mobile data at $0.38 and the most expensive is Natural gas (100 kWh) at $5.10. That is a comparison within one country's list, not a claim about value for money.

Where do Pricele's China 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 China.