Prices in South Korea 🇰🇷

In South Korea, gasoline costs $1.25, beer costs $1.33 and diesel costs $1.40. That is 15 of the 16 everyday items in the game, priced in US dollars, in KRW, and as roughly how long someone on the average local wage works to buy one.

South Korea has notably expensive fruit. Tariffs and quarantine rules restrict imports of many fresh products, and domestic orchard land is limited, so apples cost several times what they do in producing countries. Prepared food and transport, by contrast, are cheap for a high-income country. VAT is a flat 10% with basic unprocessed foodstuffs exempt, so tax explains almost none of the fruit premium. It is border policy and land, not the till. Korea is the strongest case in the table for reading a single item's price as a story about trade rules rather than about the general cost of living.

What things cost

Item	USD	Local	Work time
Big Mac	$3.74	5,500 KRW	16 min
Coca-Cola (330ml can)	$1.46	2,000 KRW	6 min
Cappuccino	$3.64	5,235 KRW	16 min
Milk (1 litre)	$2.02	2,905 KRW	9 min
Eggs (dozen)	$2.85	4,099 KRW	12 min
Apples (1 kg)	$7.84	11,275 KRW	34 min
Gasoline (1 litre)	$1.25	1,798 KRW	5 min
Diesel (1 litre)	$1.40	1,847.02 KRW	6 min
Electricity (100 kWh)	$13.00	17,084 KRW	56 min
Natural gas (100 kWh)	$7.30	9,568.7 KRW	31 min
Cigarettes (20-pack)	$3.25	4,500 KRW	14 min
Beer (330ml)	$1.33	1,848 KRW	6 min
Spirits (750ml bottle)	$2.12	2,937.5 KRW	9 min
Vape e-liquid (1 ml)	no data
Mobile data (1 GB)	$5.01	—	21 min
A day's healthy diet	$4.49	6,389.97 KRW	19 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 Korea compares

Relative to the rest of the game, South Korea is most expensive for apples, where it ranks 1st out of 32 countries at $7.84, against a global median of $2.84.

It is relatively cheapest for spirits at $2.12, which is 41st of 42, only 1 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 56 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 South Korea: 10% VAT. Ordinary groceries: basic unprocessed foodstuffs exempt. Where these come from.

Play a puzzle

South Korea 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

South Korea prices: common questions

How much do everyday things cost in South Korea?

Pricele publishes 15 everyday prices for South Korea, each from a named source. Gasoline $1.25, Beer $1.33, Diesel $1.40. 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 Korea?

South Korea uses the KRW. 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 Korea list?

Of the 15 items priced for South Korea, the cheapest is Gasoline at $1.25 and the most expensive is Electricity (100 kWh) at $13.00. That is a comparison within one country's list, not a claim about value for money.

Where do Pricele's South Korea 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 South Korea.