Tourist Trap Index 2026: Bar vs Shop Beer Prices in 30 European Cities
Across 30 European cities, a half-litre of draft beer in a bar costs a median 3.1 times a supermarket half-litre bottle (mean 3.2×). Copenhagen sits near the top at about 4.9×, Istanbul near the bottom at about 1.9×; trust the tiers, not exact ranks.
We call this ratio the Tourist Trap Index. It uses crowdsourced prices from Numbeo, collected on 16 October 2026 and shown in euros.
Key findings
- The typical gap is about 3×. Median 3.1×, mean 3.2× across the 30 cities.
- Six cities sit at 4.0× or more: Copenhagen (about 4.9×), Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, Warsaw and Vienna. Nine sit at 2.7× or less, ending with Istanbul (about 1.9×). Both ends carry uncertainty.
- A high ratio is not a high price. Belgrade shows 3.9× on a €3.19 bar beer. Dublin shows only 2.3× on a €7.00 one.
- Half the cities come with a warning. Fifteen have suspiciously round prices in Numbeo, a sign of few entries. They are marked ⚠; read them by tier only.
Beer prices in 30 cities, A to Z
Cities are listed alphabetically so the order does not suggest an exact rank.
| City | Bar beer 0.5L (€) | Shop beer 0.5L (€) | Markup (×) | Tier | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amsterdam | 6.80 | 1.57 | 4.3 | 1 | Medium |
| Athens | 5.00 | 1.88 | 2.7 | 4 | ⚠ Low |
| Barcelona | 3.50 | 1.28 | 2.7 | 4 | ⚠ Low |
| Belgrade | 3.19 | 0.81 | 3.9 | 2 | Standard |
| Berlin | 4.85 | 1.17 | 4.1 | 1 | Medium |
| Bologna | 6.00 | 1.68 | 3.6 | 2 | ⚠ Low |
| Brussels | 5.00 | 2.38 | 2.1 | 4 | ⚠ Low |
| Bucharest | 3.37 | 1.09 | 3.1 | 3 | Standard |
| Budapest | 3.30 | 1.13 | 2.9 | 3 | Standard |
| Copenhagen | 8.03 | 1.63 | 4.9 | 1 | Standard |
| Dublin | 7.00 | 3.04 | 2.3 | 4 | ⚠ Low |
| Florence | 6.00 | 1.80 | 3.3 | 2 | ⚠ Low |
| Istanbul | 4.23 | 2.17 | 1.9 | 4 | Standard |
| Lisbon | 3.00 | 1.19 | 2.5 | 4 | ⚠ Low |
| London | 8.26 | 2.80 | 3.0 | 3 | Standard |
| Lyon | 7.00 | 2.42 | 2.9 | 3 | ⚠ Low |
| Madrid | 3.50 | 1.07 | 3.3 | 2 | ⚠ Low |
| Munich | 4.65 | 1.13 | 4.1 | 1 | Standard |
| Naples | 5.00 | 1.62 | 3.1 | 3 | ⚠ Low |
| Paris | 7.00 | 2.41 | 2.9 | 3 | ⚠ Low |
| Porto | 3.00 | 1.22 | 2.5 | 4 | ⚠ Low |
| Prague | 2.83 | 1.08 | 2.6 | 4 | Standard |
| Rome | 5.00 | 1.49 | 3.4 | 2 | ⚠ Low |
| Sofia | 3.28 | 1.07 | 3.1 | 3 | Medium |
| Stockholm | 7.11 | 1.86 | 3.8 | 2 | Standard |
| Valencia | 3.00 | 1.17 | 2.6 | 4 | ⚠ Low |
| Venice | 6.00 | 1.52 | 3.9 | 2 | ⚠ Low |
| Vienna | 5.40 | 1.35 | 4.0 | 1 | Medium |
| Warsaw | 4.12 | 1.01 | 4.1 | 1 | Standard |
| Zurich | 8.60 | 2.45 | 3.5 | 2 | Standard |
Download the data (CSV) — 30 cities, Numbeo prices of 16 October 2026 in euros, with our ratio, tier and confidence flag.
⚠ Low: meal, two-person dinner and bar-beer prices are all round multiples of €0.50 in Numbeo, which suggests few contributions. Medium: two of the three are round. Standard: one or none. This is our own proxy; our data has no contributor counts.
The four tiers
Tiers are cut on the one-decimal ratio. Neighbours across a boundary are too close to separate: Vienna at 4.0× and Venice at 3.9× are effectively tied.
Tier 1 (4.0× and above)
Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, Warsaw, Vienna. A bar charges about four times the shop price for the same volume, or more. Copenhagen is the clearest case at €8.03 against €1.63. Warsaw’s shop price may be too high, which would make its true ratio bigger.
Tier 2 (3.3–3.9×)
Venice, Belgrade, Stockholm, Bologna, Zurich, Rome, Florence, Madrid. Roughly three and a half times. Five of the eight carry ⚠ (Venice, Bologna, Rome, Florence, Madrid), so hold their exact figures loosely. Zurich has the highest bar beer in the dataset, €8.60 against €2.45.
Tier 3 (2.8–3.2×)
Bucharest, Naples, Sofia, London, Budapest, Paris, Lyon. Around three times. London is dear at both ends, €8.26 and €2.80, so its ratio lands mid-table. Paris and Lyon (⚠) have shop prices that look high, so their ratios may be understated.
Tier 4 (2.7× and below)
Barcelona, Athens, Prague, Valencia, Lisbon, Porto, Dublin, Brussels, Istanbul. Two to two-and-three-quarter times. Prague is €2.83 against €1.08. Dublin and Istanbul land here because shop beer is dear, not because bars are cheap: €3.04 in Dublin, the highest shop price in the dataset, and €2.17 in Istanbul. Athens (⚠) probably belongs higher (see below).
How to read this index
It is a ratio, not a price, and it does not say why a bar charges what it charges. Our data has one figure per city, so it cannot separate tourist streets from neighbourhood bars. It covers beer only. Small differences are noise: two cities 0.2× apart are a tie.
Method and caveats
All prices come from Numbeo, a crowdsourced cost-of-living database. For each city we took the restaurant or bar price of a 0.5 L draft beer and the supermarket price of a 0.5 L bottled beer on 16 October 2026, in euros as Numbeo displays them, with no conversion or adjustment. This is a newer pull than our European food price index, so beer prices may differ slightly between the two pages.
A draft pour and a supermarket bottle are not the same product. In Spain a 0.5 L draught is not a standard serving (a caña is around 0.2 L, a tercio 0.33 L), so Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia match the definition only loosely. A €0.25 to €0.50 rounding of a bar price alone shifts a ratio by 5 to 15%.
Spot checks. Czech point-of-sale data from Dotykačka put Prague’s average half-litre at almost 70 CZK in January 2024, about €2.83; Numbeo shows €2.83 now, two years later. The Morning Advertiser’s April 2026 survey gives £6.55 for the average London pint (568 ml), about €7.74, against Numbeo’s €8.26: a little high, still plausible. For Berlin and Copenhagen we found only undated price lists. We found no independent shop price for Prague, Berlin, Vienna, London or Copenhagen.
Shop prices that look high. Greek retailer listings for 500 ml beer run from €1.17 to €1.64 (bestprice.gr, mymarket.gr, 16 October 2026), against Numbeo’s €1.88 for Athens. On those prices Athens would sit at roughly 3.0× to 4.3×, a higher tier. Numbeo’s shop price in Paris, Lyon and Brussels is about twice Berlin’s, while Eurostat’s alcohol price levels for France and Belgium are only 1.2 to 1.3 times Germany’s. For Warsaw, one discounter listing we could not confirm was far below Numbeo’s €1.01. For these five cities the ratio may be understated.
Coverage. We aimed for 40 cities; 30 have usable figures. Krakow and Seville returned no data, and eight more (Dubrovnik, Split, Ljubljana, Tallinn, Riga, Edinburgh, Reykjavik, Thessaloniki) were not collected because we hit Numbeo’s request limit. We have estimated none of them. They will be added in an update once we have figures we trust.
Eurostat cross-check
Eurostat has no beer index and no markup index, so it cannot confirm the ratio directly, only the bar side. We compared Numbeo’s bar-beer prices with Eurostat’s 2024 price level indices (prc_ppp_ind, EU27 = 100) for restaurants and hotels (A0111). The Spearman rank correlation is 0.84 across the 29 cities with a 2024 figure (no 2024 value for the UK, so London is out) and 0.86 across 20 countries. The bar price follows the official ranking.
The ratio is a different matter. Against the same index its correlation is only 0.30 to 0.38, which fits: a ratio is not a price level. Against Eurostat’s alcoholic-beverages index (A010201) it is slightly negative, about −0.33 to −0.36. That is consistent with Istanbul and Dublin: retail alcohol levels are 202.6 in Türkiye and 197.6 in Ireland, so shop beer is dear and the ratio is squeezed. Limits: Eurostat is 2024, our prices 2026, and A0111 includes hotels while A010201 covers all alcohol.
Where to go next
Planning meals in any of these cities? Our European food price index covers what a meal costs, and our city guides for Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Athens and Copenhagen show where to eat once you have sat down.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the tourist trap index?
Our name for one ratio: a bar's half-litre draft beer price divided by a supermarket's half-litre bottle price, in the same city. It is a city-wide average, so it cannot point at individual tourist traps.
How is it calculated?
We divided Numbeo's bar price by its shop price for each city (figures from 16 October 2026, in euros) and grouped cities into four tiers. A bar draft and a shop bottle are not the same product, so this compares two ways of buying half a litre of beer, not one beer at two prices.
Which cities have the highest bar-to-shop beer markup?
Copenhagen at about 4.9×, then Amsterdam (4.3×), Berlin, Munich and Warsaw (4.1× each) and Vienna (4.0×). The gaps between the last five are smaller than the data's noise, so read them as one group. In this dataset Istanbul comes out lowest, at about 1.9×.
Are the numbers exact?
No. Numbeo is crowdsourced, 15 of the 30 cities are flagged ⚠ for likely thin data, and rounding of €0.25 to €0.50 in a bar price moves a ratio by 5 to 15%.
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