Pricele

Prices in South Africa 🇿🇦

In South Africa, beer costs $0.54, coca-cola costs $0.81 and milk costs $1.20. That is 15 of the 16 everyday items in the game, priced in US dollars, in ZAR, and as roughly how long someone on the average local wage works to buy one.

South Africa has low prices in dollar terms but the widest gap in the game between price and affordability: measured in work time at the average wage, its groceries cost far more than the dollar figures suggest. Fuel is regulated and adjusted monthly by the government. VAT is 15% with a defined basket of basic foods zero-rated, a list that is explicitly a poverty measure and has been publicly debated and extended over the years. South Africa is the strongest argument in this dataset for not reading dollar prices as a cost of living: on the dollar column it looks affordable, and on the work-time column it is the hardest country in the table.

What things cost

ItemUSDLocalWork time
Big Mac$3.3654.9 ZAR45 min
Coca-Cola (330ml can)$0.8115 ZAR11 min
Cappuccino$2.3138.24 ZAR31 min
Milk (1 litre)$1.2019.86 ZAR16 min
Eggs (dozen)$2.5041.38 ZAR33 min
Apples (1 kg)$1.8029.79 ZAR24 min
Gasoline (1 litre)$1.4223.5 ZAR19 min
Diesel (1 litre)$1.7828.89 ZAR24 min
Electricity (100 kWh)$27.80452.4 ZAR6.2 h
Natural gas (100 kWh)no data
Cigarettes (20-pack)$2.6247.7 ZAR35 min
Beer (330ml)$0.549.9 ZAR7 min
Spirits (750ml bottle)$9.32170 ZAR2.1 h
Vape e-liquid (1 ml)$1.7431.66 ZAR23 min
Mobile data (1 GB)$1.81—24 min
A day's healthy diet$1.7431.14 ZAR23 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 South Africa compares

Relative to the rest of the game, South Africa is most expensive for electricity (100 kWh), where it ranks 11th out of 48 countries at $27.80, against a global median of $20.65.

It is relatively cheapest for big mac at $3.36, which is 39th of 45, 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 6.2 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 South Africa: 15% VAT. Ordinary groceries: a defined basket of basic foods is zero-rated. Where these come from.

Play a puzzle

South Africa 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.

Other countries

Why a country's prices look the way they do

South Africa prices: common questions

How much do everyday things cost in South Africa?
Pricele publishes 15 everyday prices for South Africa, each from a named source. Beer $0.54, Coca-Cola $0.81, Milk $1.20. 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 South Africa?
South Africa uses the ZAR. 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 South Africa list?
Of the 15 items priced for South Africa, the cheapest is Beer at $0.54 and the most expensive is Electricity (100 kWh) at $27.80. That is a comparison within one country's list, not a claim about value for money.
Where do Pricele's South Africa 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), WHO Global Health Observatory, tobacco tax survey 2024 (cheapest disposable device), 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 South Africa.