About & methodology

What prices.eu.org is

A daily, static snapshot of consumer prices across all 27 EU member states: fuel prices (petrol 95 and diesel), wholesale day-ahead electricity prices, euro reference exchange rates, housing costs (house prices, rents, mortgage rates), grocery price inflation, statutory minimum wages and purchasing power (the Big Mac index). There is no database: every morning a set of small scripts fetches each national source, normalises the values and rebuilds this site. All data is free to use, attribution appreciated.

Fuel

• Values are pump prices in EUR per litre including VAT; most countries’ excise duties are also included because national monitors publish them that way.
• Where a source reports a median across stations we use the median; where it reports volume-weighted or simple averages we use those, as each source defines it. The exact rule is documented on the sources page.
• Countries pricing in local currency are converted at the ECB reference rate of the same day.
• Product mapping: “petrol 95” is Super 95 / E10 where E10 is the dominant grade (DE), otherwise regular 95-octane petrol; “diesel” is standard automotive diesel (B7).

Electricity

• Wholesale figures are day-ahead market-coupling daily averages in EUR/MWh, excluding taxes and levies, taken from each bidding zone’s power exchange or NEMO.
• The stored delivery day can be today or tomorrow depending on when the market publishes; the date is always shown next to the value.
• Cyprus and Malta run isolated grids without day-ahead market coupling, so they show Eurostat household retail rates instead.
• Retail household figures come from Eurostat semi-annual collection and include taxes, levies and VAT.

Currency

• ECB euro foreign exchange reference rates, published every working day around 16:00 CET. These are middle rates; banks add their own spreads.
• Day-over-day change compares the two latest reference days.
• Bulgaria’s lev is shown at its fixed conversion rate of 1.95583 per euro, in force since Bulgaria adopted the euro on 1 January 2026.

Housing

• House prices come from the Eurostat House Price Index (HPI, 2015=100) as year-on-year change for the whole country; where a national index adds useful detail we show it too (for example the Destatis residential property price index for Germany, and voivodeship-level transaction prices from Poland’s GUS Local Data Bank).
• Rents are the HICP “actual rentals for housing” index, also 2015=100 and shown as year-on-year change; they cover existing tenancies, so they move more slowly than advertised asking rents.
• Mortgage rates are the ECB’s MFI interest rate on new loans to households for house purchase, a euro-area/eu-country aggregate updated monthly.
• Where a country has no comparable house price index (Greece, for example), its housing page explains why instead of showing a number.

Groceries

• Food inflation figures are Eurostat HICP sub-indices (2015=100): food and non-alcoholic beverages overall (CP01) plus bread and cereals (CP0111), meat (CP0112) and milk, cheese and eggs (CP0114), compared year-on-year. HICP is harmonised across countries, which makes the ranking comparable even if shopping baskets differ.
• A small crowdsourced micro sample of individual product prices comes from the Open Prices database; coverage is uneven, so it complements rather than replaces the official indices.

Wages

• Statutory monthly minimum wages come from Eurostat’s semi-annual collection, shown in EUR and in purchasing power standards (PPS). Countries without a statutory minimum wage (for example Denmark, Italy, Austria, Finland and Sweden) are listed as such.
• Benchmark rates alongside the wage table are the ECB’s euro short-term rate (€STR) and the 3-month EURIBOR.

Purchasing power (Big Mac index)

• The Big Mac index follows The Economist’s methodology: it compares burger prices as a lighthearted gauge of whether currencies are at their “correct” level, shown raw and GDP-adjusted against the US dollar and the euro.
• Coverage is limited to the EU countries for which consistent local Big Mac prices are published; history charts are EUR-based.

Disclaimers

Figures are provided for information only and may differ from what you pay at an individual station, under your energy contract, in your tenancy or at your bank. Averages hide regional and temporal variation. We are not affiliated with any of the sources. No warranties; verify critical numbers with the linked original sources.

Contact

Corrections and feedback: contact placeholder. The whole pipeline is open: fetchers, normalisation logic and this site are rebuilt from scratch on every run, so errors do not accumulate.