Prices in Costa Rica 🇨🇷

In Costa Rica, diesel costs $1.35, beer costs $1.81 and mobile data costs $1.86. That is 8 of the 16 everyday items in the game, priced in US dollars, in CRC, and as roughly how long someone on the average local wage works to buy one.

Costa Rica is conspicuously expensive for Central America, and the reasons are structural rather than fiscal: a small domestic market, wages well above its neighbours, and most manufactured goods imported. Its VAT has the most finely graded ladder in this table, running from 13% standard down through 4% for private health, 2% for medicines and 1% for goods of basic consumption, which means the headline rate says very little about what any particular item carries. Electricity is close to fully renewable and priced by a regulator rather than a market, so it moves in steps rather than with fuel.

What things cost

Item	USD	Local	Work time
Big Mac	$6.04	2,990 CRC	57 min
Coca-Cola (330ml can)	no data
Cappuccino	no data
Milk (1 litre)	no data
Eggs (dozen)	no data
Apples (1 kg)	no data
Gasoline (1 litre)	no data
Diesel (1 litre)	$1.35	606 CRC	13 min
Electricity (100 kWh)	$19.10	8,590.9 CRC	3.0 h
Natural gas (100 kWh)	no data
Cigarettes (20-pack)	$4.58	2,400 CRC	43 min
Beer (330ml)	$1.81	950 CRC	17 min
Spirits (750ml bottle)	$17.57	9,214.29 CRC	2.8 h
Vape e-liquid (1 ml)	no data
Mobile data (1 GB)	$1.86	—	18 min
A day's healthy diet	$3.19	1,607.64 CRC	30 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 Costa Rica compares

Relative to the rest of the game, Costa Rica is most expensive for beer, where it ranks 5th out of 42 countries at $1.81, against a global median of $1.00.

It is relatively cheapest for diesel at $1.35, which is 33rd of 49, 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 electricity (100 kWh), at roughly 3.0 hours 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 Costa Rica: 13% VAT. Ordinary groceries: 1% on goods of basic consumption. Where these come from.

Play a puzzle

Costa Rica 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

Costa Rica prices: common questions

How much do everyday things cost in Costa Rica?

Pricele publishes 8 everyday prices for Costa Rica, each from a named source. Diesel $1.35, Beer $1.81, Mobile data $1.86. 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 Costa Rica?

Costa Rica uses the CRC. 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 Costa Rica list?

Of the 8 items priced for Costa Rica, the cheapest is Diesel at $1.35 and the most expensive is Electricity (100 kWh) at $19.10. That is a comparison within one country's list, not a claim about value for money.

Where do Pricele's Costa Rica prices come from?

Every row names its source and the date it was collected. They come from The Economist Big Mac Index, Jan 2026, 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 Costa Rica.