Prices in Japan 🇯🇵

In Japan, diesel costs $1.00, gasoline costs $1.09 and coca-cola costs $1.15. That is 15 of the 16 everyday items in the game, priced in US dollars, in JPY, and as roughly how long someone on the average local wage works to buy one.

Japan is the clearest case in the game of a country that stopped feeling expensive. A weak yen has pushed dollar prices well below where they sat a decade ago, and the Big Mac Index now scores the yen as one of the most undervalued major currencies. Fruit is the exception, since premium apples are a gift category and priced like one. Japan also runs one of the few consumption taxes that changes with how you consume: 10% standard, but 8% on food and non-alcoholic drinks bought to take away, so the same coffee is taxed differently depending on whether you sit down with it. For a table built partly out of café items, that distinction is not academic.

What things cost

Item	USD	Local	Work time
Big Mac	$3.03	480 JPY	11 min
Coca-Cola (330ml can)	$1.15	180 JPY	4 min
Cappuccino	$3.14	497 JPY	12 min
Milk (1 litre)	$1.47	233 JPY	6 min
Eggs (dozen)	$2.07	328 JPY	8 min
Apples (1 kg)	$4.94	782 JPY	19 min
Gasoline (1 litre)	$1.09	173 JPY	4 min
Diesel (1 litre)	$1.00	159.5 JPY	4 min
Electricity (100 kWh)	$21.70	3,470.7 JPY	81 min
Natural gas (100 kWh)	$7.70	1,226 JPY	29 min
Cigarettes (20-pack)	$3.94	600 JPY	15 min
Beer (330ml)	$1.39	211.2 JPY	5 min
Spirits (750ml bottle)	$12.88	1,962.86 JPY	48 min
Vape e-liquid (1 ml)	no data
Mobile data (1 GB)	$3.48	—	13 min
A day's healthy diet	$5.52	825.63 JPY	21 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 Japan compares

Relative to the rest of the game, Japan is most expensive for healthy diet, where it ranks 1st out of 49 countries at $5.52, against a global median of $2.57.

It is relatively cheapest for diesel at $1.00, which is 45th of 49, only 4 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 81 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 Japan: 10% consumption tax. Ordinary groceries: 8% on food and non-alcoholic drinks bought to take away. Where these come from.

Play a puzzle

Japan 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

Japan prices: common questions

How much do everyday things cost in Japan?

Pricele publishes 15 everyday prices for Japan, each from a named source. Diesel $1.00, Gasoline $1.09, Coca-Cola $1.15. 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 Japan?

Japan uses the JPY. 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 Japan list?

Of the 15 items priced for Japan, the cheapest is Diesel at $1.00 and the most expensive is Electricity (100 kWh) at $21.70. That is a comparison within one country's list, not a claim about value for money.

Where do Pricele's Japan 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 Japan.