Prices in Philippines 🇵🇭

In Philippines, mobile data costs $0.59, beer costs $0.75 and diesel costs $1.44. That is 8 of the 16 everyday items in the game, priced in US dollars, in PHP, and as roughly how long someone on the average local wage works to buy one.

The Philippines pays for its geography. Moving goods between more than seven thousand islands adds a freight cost to almost everything, and it lands on top of a 12% VAT. Electricity is the sharpest case: generation is privately owned, largely coal-fired and largely imported, and there is no household subsidy, which leaves Filipino households paying among the highest power tariffs in Asia in dollar terms, and far more than that measured against local wages. Rice is the countervailing example, managed through tariffs and an import fund precisely because it is politically impossible to let it float.

What things cost

Item	USD	Local	Work time
Big Mac	$2.84	169 PHP	84 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)	$1.44	88.8 PHP	43 min
Electricity (100 kWh)	$21.50	1,331.8 PHP	10.6 h
Natural gas (100 kWh)	no data
Cigarettes (20-pack)	$2.66	156 PHP	79 min
Beer (330ml)	$0.75	44 PHP	22 min
Spirits (750ml bottle)	$2.00	117 PHP	59 min
Vape e-liquid (1 ml)	no data
Mobile data (1 GB)	$0.59	—	18 min
A day's healthy diet	$1.60	92.07 PHP	48 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 Philippines compares

Relative to the rest of the game, Philippines is most expensive for electricity (100 kWh), where it ranks 23rd out of 48 countries at $21.50, against a global median of $20.65.

It is relatively cheapest for big mac at $2.84, which is 42nd of 45, only 3 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 10.6 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 Philippines: 12% VAT. Where these come from.

Play a puzzle

Philippines 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

Philippines prices: common questions

How much do everyday things cost in Philippines?

Pricele publishes 8 everyday prices for Philippines, each from a named source. Mobile data $0.59, Beer $0.75, Diesel $1.44. 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 Philippines?

Philippines uses the PHP. 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 Philippines list?

Of the 8 items priced for Philippines, the cheapest is Mobile data at $0.59 and the most expensive is Electricity (100 kWh) at $21.50. That is a comparison within one country's list, not a claim about value for money.

Where do Pricele's Philippines 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 Philippines.