Prices in Hungary 🇭🇺

In Hungary, beer costs $0.58, mobile data costs $1.71 and diesel costs $2.09. That is 9 of the 16 everyday items in the game, priced in US dollars, in HUF, and as roughly how long someone on the average local wage works to buy one.

Hungary charges 27% VAT, the highest standard rate in the world, and that single fact explains more about Hungarian prices than anything else in this note. Food falls to 18% for milk, dairy and cereal products and to 5% for a few others, but the gap between the headline rate and what a shopper actually pays is smaller here than almost anywhere. Pulling the other way, household energy is heavily regulated: the long-running utility price cap holds electricity and gas well below what the market would charge, so those rows look out of step with the rest of the country's prices.

What things cost

Item	USD	Local	Work time
Big Mac	$4.99	1,660 HUF	35 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)	$2.09	659 HUF	15 min
Electricity (100 kWh)	$12.30	3,895 HUF	86 min
Natural gas (100 kWh)	$9.60	3,042.4 HUF	67 min
Cigarettes (20-pack)	$6.29	2,300 HUF	44 min
Beer (330ml)	$0.58	210.54 HUF	4 min
Spirits (750ml bottle)	$10.11	3,696 HUF	71 min
Vape e-liquid (1 ml)	no data
Mobile data (1 GB)	$1.71	—	12 min
A day's healthy diet	$2.92	1,031.79 HUF	20 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 Hungary compares

Relative to the rest of the game, Hungary is most expensive for diesel, where it ranks 17th out of 49 countries at $2.09, against a global median of $1.55.

It is relatively cheapest for beer at $0.58, which is 36th of 42, only 6 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 86 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 Hungary: 27% ÁFA. Ordinary groceries: 18% on milk, dairy and cereal products. Where these come from.

Play a puzzle

Hungary 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

Hungary prices: common questions

How much do everyday things cost in Hungary?

Pricele publishes 9 everyday prices for Hungary, each from a named source. Beer $0.58, Mobile data $1.71, Diesel $2.09. 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 Hungary?

Hungary uses the HUF. 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 Hungary list?

Of the 9 items priced for Hungary, the cheapest is Beer at $0.58 and the most expensive is Electricity (100 kWh) at $12.30. That is a comparison within one country's list, not a claim about value for money.

Where do Pricele's Hungary 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 Hungary.