Prices in Turkey 🇹🇷
In Turkey, mobile data costs $0.44, coca-cola costs $0.95 and milk costs $1.02. That is 15 of the 16 everyday items in the game, priced in US dollars, in TRY, and as roughly how long someone on the average local wage works to buy one.
Turkey has run high inflation for several years, so lira prices climb quickly while the currency falls against the dollar. The two roughly offset, which keeps Turkish dollar prices low but makes any single reading unusually time-sensitive. KDV is 20% standard with reduced bands of 10% and 1% covering most food, and those bands have themselves been moved repeatedly during the inflation of recent years. Turkey is the country in this table where the collection date matters most after Argentina: the figures are not wrong so much as perishable.
What things cost
| Item | USD | Local | Work time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Big Mac | $5.90 | 255 TRY | 89 min |
| Coca-Cola (330ml can) | $0.95 | 35 TRY | 14 min |
| Cappuccino | $3.60 | 171.17 TRY | 54 min |
| Milk (1 litre) | $1.02 | 48.5 TRY | 15 min |
| Eggs (dozen) | $2.13 | 101.28 TRY | 32 min |
| Apples (1 kg) | $1.80 | 85.59 TRY | 27 min |
| Gasoline (1 litre) | $1.30 | 61.81 TRY | 20 min |
| Diesel (1 litre) | $1.66 | 79.68 TRY | 25 min |
| Electricity (100 kWh) | $5.80 | 280 TRY | 87 min |
| Natural gas (100 kWh) | $2.00 | 93.7 TRY | 30 min |
| Cigarettes (20-pack) | $2.21 | 73 TRY | 33 min |
| Beer (330ml) | $2.36 | 78 TRY | 35 min |
| Spirits (750ml bottle) | $31.76 | 1,050 TRY | 7.9 h |
| Vape e-liquid (1 ml) | no data | ||
| Mobile data (1 GB) | $0.44 | — | 7 min |
| A day's healthy diet | $1.91 | 75.44 TRY | 29 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 Turkey compares
Relative to the rest of the game, Turkey is most expensive for beer, where it ranks 2nd out of 42 countries at $2.36, against a global median of $1.00.
It is relatively cheapest for electricity (100 kWh) at $5.80, which is 44th of 48, 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 spirits, at roughly 7.9 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 Turkey: 20% KDV. Ordinary groceries: reduced rates of 10% and 1% cover most food. Where these come from.
Play a puzzle
Turkey 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
- Argentina
- Australia
- Bangladesh
- Brazil
- Canada
- Chile
- China
- Colombia
- Costa Rica
- Czechia
- Egypt
- France
- Germany
- Ghana
- Hungary
- India
- Indonesia
- Ireland
- Israel
- Italy
- Japan
- Lebanon
- Malaysia
- Mexico
- Netherlands
- New Zealand
- Nigeria
- Norway
- Pakistan
- Peru
- Philippines
- Poland
- Portugal
- Romania
- Saudi Arabia
- Singapore
- South Africa
- South Korea
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Tanzania
- Thailand
- United Arab Emirates
- United Kingdom
- United States
- Uruguay
- Vietnam
Why a country's prices look the way they do
- Why poor countries are cheap, and why it is not what you thinkThe real answer has nothing to do with profits or standards. It is a sixty-year-old piece of economics about haircuts, and it explains most of the price map.
- A fifth of what you paid was tax, and you never saw the lineConsumption tax is the largest single wedge between two countries' prices for an identical product, and the one shoppers are least able to see.
- The salary comparison you keep seeing online is wrongConverting a wage at the market exchange rate answers a question nobody asked. Purchasing power parity answers the one you meant, and has its own traps.
- How to compare two countries without fooling yourselfCost-of-living comparisons go wrong in the same six ways every time. What follows is a method that survives contact with a real decision.