Pricele

Prices in Switzerland 🇨🇭

In Switzerland, beer costs $1.44, milk costs $2.25 and gasoline costs $2.28. That is 16 of the 16 everyday items in the game, priced in US dollars, in CHF, and as roughly how long someone on the average local wage works to buy one.

Switzerland is the most expensive country in the game for almost every item, and the Big Mac Index has used it as the standing example of an overvalued currency for years. High wages are the main cause, and Swiss prices look far less extreme once you divide by what people earn. It is also, strikingly, a low-tax country on consumption: VAT is 8.1%, among the lowest in Europe, and food is charged at just 2.6%. Switzerland is therefore the cleanest disproof in this table of the idea that expensive countries are expensive because of tax. Almost none of the Swiss premium is collected by the state.

What things cost

ItemUSDLocalWork time
Big Mac$9.087.3 CHF16 min
Coca-Cola (330ml can)$2.462.2 CHF4 min
Cappuccino$6.315.1 CHF11 min
Milk (1 litre)$2.251.82 CHF4 min
Eggs (dozen)$7.686.21 CHF14 min
Apples (1 kg)$3.723.01 CHF7 min
Gasoline (1 litre)$2.281.84 CHF4 min
Diesel (1 litre)$2.722.21 CHF5 min
Electricity (100 kWh)$38.2031 CHF67 min
Natural gas (100 kWh)$18.1014.7 CHF32 min
Cigarettes (20-pack)$10.449.2 CHF18 min
Beer (330ml)$1.441.27 CHF3 min
Spirits (750ml bottle)$24.2021.32 CHF43 min
Vape e-liquid (1 ml)$2.382.1 CHF4 min
Mobile data (1 GB)$7.29—13 min
A day's healthy diet$4.193.48 CHF7 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 Switzerland compares

Relative to the rest of the game, Switzerland is most expensive for big mac, where it ranks 1st out of 45 countries at $9.08, against a global median of $5.53.

It is relatively cheapest for vape liquid at $2.38, which is 13th of 20, only 7 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 67 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 Switzerland: 8.1% VAT. Ordinary groceries: 2.6% on food. Where these come from.

Play a puzzle

Switzerland 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

Switzerland prices: common questions

How much do everyday things cost in Switzerland?
Pricele publishes 16 everyday prices for Switzerland, each from a named source. Beer $1.44, Milk $2.25, Gasoline $2.28. 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 Switzerland?
Switzerland uses the CHF. 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 Switzerland list?
Of the 16 items priced for Switzerland, the cheapest is Beer at $1.44 and the most expensive is Electricity (100 kWh) at $38.20. That is a comparison within one country's list, not a claim about value for money.
Where do Pricele's Switzerland 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 Switzerland.