What €100 can get you in 15 of Europe’s major capital cities? (4)

Anyone who has travelled to foreign countries knows that prices can change a lot from one city to the next, even within the same country. With €100, you won’t have the same level of purchasing power in Madrid as you would in, say, London or Athens.

The purchasing power of the currency in a given country depends on a number of factors, one of which is the level of wages. That’s why prices can be noticeably different from country to country. There are various indicators that come into play when comparing the price of a product in every country to gauge the purchasing power of its inhabitants. To keep it simple, we focused on just one question: What can €100 get you in 15 of Europe’s major capital cities?

Like the capital of neighbouring Romania and many other major cities in Eastern Europe, Sofia is a particularly affordable capital city. Even compared to other cities in the region, it’s still very inexpensive. You can expect to spend about €0.98 for a beer at a bar, €5 for a bottle of wine, €1 for a cappuccino, €5 for breakfast and an all-too-reasonable €10 for a three-course dinner at a restaurant.

The average monthly salary in Poland is less than €800, and this is reflected in the price levels. In Warsaw, you can even rent a place to live for less than €100 per month. A cappuccino will cost you around €1.50 and you can have lunch at a normal restaurant for €5.

Bucharest is one of the least expensive capital cities in Europe. With €100 you can get pretty far. For example, you can have lunch at a moderately priced restaurant every week for a month, purchase roughly 220 bus tickets, order more than 75 cappuccinos or go to the cinema twice a month for a year.

€100 can buy different things depending on where you are. As we have just discovered, the price of goods and services can vary quite a bit across Europe. It depends on a number of factors such as wages, exchange rates, taxes and monetary policies.