Price level (US = 100)
How expensive a country is relative to the United States: 50 means goods cost about half of US prices on average.
How it is measured
Computed as the PPP conversion factor divided by the official exchange rate, scaled to US = 100. PPP factors come from the International Comparison Program’s price surveys.
Where the number came from
The International Comparison Program began in 1968 as a research project by Irving Kravis, Alan Heston and Robert Summers at the University of Pennsylvania, and it is the reason purchasing power parity exists as a usable statistic rather than a theory. The work is genuinely enormous: producing a PPP factor means pricing a matched basket of hundreds of comparable items across every participating economy, so that a kilo of rice, a haircut and a hospital bed can be compared across places where they cost wildly different amounts of very different money. The Penn World Table grew out of that effort and became the standard dataset for cross-country growth research. Because the pricing rounds are expensive they happen only every few years, most recently for reference years such as 2011, 2017 and 2021, and the factors are extrapolated between rounds. That cadence is why a PPP-based figure is more stable but less current than an exchange-rate one.
Worked example: what an Indian income is worth at Indian prices
Our 2025 figures put India at about 23 on this index, meaning the general price level is roughly a quarter of the American one, against Switzerland near 112, Norway around 91, Japan about 65 and the United States at 100 by construction. Put that beside the Indian GDP per capita figure on this site, about $2,702 for 2025, and the arithmetic is straightforward: divided by an index of 23, that income commands something in the region of $11,700 worth of goods and services at American prices. That is why India’s output measured at purchasing power parity is several times its output at market exchange rates, and why the two numbers on the GDP page differ by a factor of about 3.5. The correction is not uniform across everything you might buy. Internationally traded goods, an iPhone or a litre of imported fuel, cost close to the same everywhere and are barely discounted; the gap is concentrated in services and non-traded goods, in rent, in a haircut, in domestic help, in a bus fare, precisely because those are paid for in local wages. So the index tells you accurately how far a local salary goes on a local life, and tells you very little about how far it goes on a laptop.
Figures read from our own price level (us = 100) table; each row there carries its observation year and whether it came from a live feed or the frozen archive.
Our data source
Computed from World Bank PA.NUS.PPP and PA.NUS.FCRF.
Refresh cadence: Annual PPP updates; exchange rates lag differently by country. Taken on each rebuild.
What to watch for
A country-wide average across all goods: tradables (electronics) vary less than services (haircuts, rent). Capital-city costs for expats are a different measure entirely. Because the index divides a slowly-updated PPP factor by a fast-moving exchange rate, countries in currency crisis or with multiple official rates can produce extreme values that reflect the arithmetic rather than any shop price.