Methodology

No global body tracks the price of an espresso. This page explains how we estimate one anyway — and exactly how much to trust each number.

Sources

Every price is the estimated cost, in US dollars, of a single espresso shot at an ordinary café in the country's major cities. Three kinds of evidence feed the index, and every row is labeled by which kind produced it:

• Espresso price surveys and public price-index data, for the 40 economies where espresso itself is directly tracked.
• Cappuccino price data — including crowd-sourced cost-of-living indices such as Numbeo, used strictly as an input for our own derived estimates and never republished as raw data — converted to espresso prices for 60 economies.
• Regional anchor prices and cost-of-living relationships, for the 96 economies with no reliable direct data.

Purchasing-power context comes from the World Bank (GDP per capita, current US$, series NY.GDP.PCAP.CD). The homepage macro strip reads the FRED coffee CPI series and the IMF arabica price series, refreshed at most every six hours.

The cappuccino conversion

Cappuccino prices are tracked far more widely than espresso prices. In markets where both are known, an espresso typically runs 60–75% of the cappuccino price — the milk, the cup size, and the counter time are what you're paying for. In Southern European counter-service cultures the espresso is independently cheaper still. We convert at ~65%, the middle of that band, and label every converted price derived.

Confidence tiers

Every row carries one of three badges. The bands below are encoded in each record's priceLow/priceHigh and shown wherever the price appears.

Burden and ranking

The Espresso Burden is the share of one day's GDP per capita that a single shot costs: price ÷ (GDP per capita ÷ 365) × 100. Ranks use competition ranking on price, descending — ties share the minimum rank and the next rank skips (1, 2, 2, 4) — with tied economies listed alphabetically. Rank 1 is the most expensive shot on Earth.

Limitations, stated plainly

• No global body tracks espresso prices. Everything here is an estimate; the tiers say how good an estimate.
• Crowd-sourced price data skews urban and touristy.
• The modeled tier (±40%) is inference, not observation — 96 of 196 economies.
• Currency swings can move rankings quickly — an Argentina-style devaluation reshuffles the board between data updates.
• GDP per capita is a proxy for daily income, not disposable income. It is the biggest methodological leap on this site.
• World Bank GDP figures use the most recent available year and can lag badly: Eritrea's latest is 2011, South Sudan's 2015, Yemen's 2018, Cuba's 2020. Burdens built on pre-2022 GDP show their year in the table.
• Two economies have no World Bank GDP data at all — Taiwan and Vatican City — so their burden shows “—”.

Why 196 economies

The count is 196 economies, not 195 UN member states: we include Taiwan, Hong Kong, Kosovo, and Vatican City, and exclude North Korea, which has no market café pricing to estimate.

Changelog

• 2026-07-02 — v1.0.0. Initial dataset: 196 economies (40 surveyed, 60 derived, 96 modeled). Burden and ranks computed from World Bank GDP per capita, most recent non-empty year.

Every price change lands as a git commit in the public repository — the full audit history is the point. Spotted a wrong price? Tell us.