Is food in Hungary three times more expensive than in the UK?

Have you ever been curious about what food costs in different countries? What could people buy in different countries for about the same sum of money?

Thanks to G7, you can picture the price differences between Hungary and the United Kingdom. The Hungarian news site has been making comparisons of prices of different essential food products between stores and countries for some time now. Still, with the comparison of Hungary and the UK, they have found some surprising differences.

To conduct the comparison – keep in mind, it is not a representative comparison –, G7 asked one of their readers, Péter, who lives in the United Kingdom, to check the prices of a few essential food products in an Aldi store.

Hungary vs the United Kingdom

The staff of G7 have been surprised by the prices quite a few times.

The most shocking numbers were the price of the spaghetti pasta made from durum wheat and the price per kilogram of grade “A” rice. The former was well over three times as much in Hungary, and the latter costs almost twice as much in Hungary.

According to Hvg, the news site had to change a few things to accommodate to differences between Hungary and the United Kingdom. Previously, they had been inspecting the price of 42 essential products in the Hungarian Aldi and Lidl, and recently in Penny and Tesco.

Here are the biggest extremes in Budapest’s new property market!

Their usual price comparison aims to try and show inflation and deflation through the cost of an average family’s shopping in Hungary.

To accommodate the data, they had to drop and change a few items. In Hungary, for example, people buy ground coffee more often, but it is not that widely available in Aldi stores in the UK. They could only find sliced Gouda cheese. They also used the price of toast bread in the UK compared to the regular Hungarian bread, assuming shopping differences.

Conclusion

According to their findings, 14 products, including pasta, flour, potatoes, and carrots, are cheaper in the UK than in Hungary. Moreover, some of them were significantly cheaper.

Even though many items are cheaper, the total price of the shopping is a bit more expensive in the UK, approximately € 36.83, while this number is € 33.02 in Hungary.

According to G7, if we consider the median wages of both countries, we get a more shocking difference. The median wage in Hungary is around 210,000 forints, or roughly € 583.33. In the UK, it is approximately 2,000 pounds, which is over € 2,311.11.

Comparing these wages to the price of a shopping, it turns out that while it takes about 5.6% of the Hungarian median wage, it is only 1.6% of the median salary of the United Kingdom.

G7 found that one factor that could cause this difference is VAT. The UK has a different tax policy, and hence, there is negligible VAT on many food products.

Source: G7.hu, Hvg.hu