The Oasis Index: What 5 Beers and 2 Packs of Cigarettes Cost in 69 Cities

Every July, Deutsche Bank's research team publishes Mapping the World's Prices, a genuinely serious report on global cost of living. And every year, tucked between rental yields and purchasing-power parities, they hide our favourite economic indicator: the Oasis Index, the cost of 5 beers and 2 packs of cigarettes, in US dollars, city by city.

Yes, it is named after the band. "Cigarettes & Alcohol" came out in 1994, and with the reunion tour still selling out stadiums, the index has never felt more current. We read the 2026 edition so you don't have to, and because we make maps for a living, we put all 69 cities on an interactive globe.

Melbourne, where a night out costs $111

The 2026 winner (or loser, depending on your perspective) is Melbourne at $111.20, with Sydney right behind at $109.50. That is more than double New York, and the report is blunt about why: Australia's "relentless application of sin taxes". A decade ago the same basket cost $57 in Melbourne. It has risen 89% since.

Auckland and Wellington complete an Australasian top four, and then comes the UK's tobacco-duty trio: London ($63.90), Birmingham ($62.80) and Edinburgh ($60.50), with Dublin wedged between them.

At the other end of the table, the same evening costs $10.40 in Shanghai, $11.70 in Rio de Janeiro and $12.10 in Cairo. The spread between the most and least expensive city is nearly 11x. There are not many products where the identical basket varies that much, and almost all of the gap is policy, not beer.

Spin the globe yourself

Every pin below is a city in the index. Toggle the years to watch a decade of sin taxes, currency swings and structural repricing play out. Drag to spin, click a pin or a ranking for the full price history.

The decade is the real story

A single-year ranking is fun, but the 2016 to 2026 changes are where it gets interesting.

The risers are not who you would guess. Bogota tops the list at +98%, followed by Mexico City (+92%), Prague (+89%), Melbourne (+89%) and Budapest (+86%). Central Europe's convergence with Western price levels shows up in beer money just as clearly as it does in salaries, where the same report has Budapest wages up 161% over the decade.

The fallers tell sharper stories:

• Dubai is down 48%, the biggest decline in the sample. In 2016 it was one of the five most expensive cities for this basket at $50. Today it sits mid-table at $25.90, cheaper than Frankfurt.
• Tokyo is down 31%. In 2012 a night out there cost more than in New York. Japan's long structural repricing, a theme the report returns to again and again, means Tokyo now ranks 55th of 69, between Bangalore and Istanbul.
• Shanghai is down 16% and is now the cheapest city in the entire index.

Closer to home for us: Berlin is up 55% to $28.20, and Munich up 48% to $27.40. Painful at the Späti, perhaps, but still a quarter of Melbourne.

The tables, for the record

The ten most expensive and ten cheapest cities in 2026:

And the biggest movers, 2016 to 2026:

How we built this

The globe above is a MapLibre scene running right inside this article, with no tracking and no map tokens. The beer-glass pins were generated with our free Map Icon Creator, the same tool we offer for building custom store locator markers. Price becomes both the size and the colour of each pin, so the expensive cities jump out even from orbit.

This is a small, playful example of what we do all day: turning location data into something people can actually see and act on. If your data has coordinates attached, whether that is stores, competitors, customers or prices, a map is usually the fastest way to understand it.

Methodology and source

All prices come from Mapping the World's Prices 2026 (10th edition, July 2026) by the Deutsche Bank Research Institute, who kindly invite readers to quote the report with attribution. You can find it and their other research at dbresearch.com. The underlying price data is primarily crowdsourced from Numbeo, cleaned and cross-checked by the report's authors, who sensibly warn that crowdsourced data is noisy and best read for broad trends rather than single data points.

The Oasis basket is 5 half-litre domestic beers plus 2 packs of cigarettes, converted to US dollars. We transcribed Figure 42 of the report for the visualisation above; the ranking, prices and change figures are Deutsche Bank's. The globe, the pins and any transcription mistakes are ours.