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Where does eating well cost least?

Pakistan leads on per person per day at $0.92 a day; Burkina Faso is last of the 15 shown at $1.30 a day.

Most cost-of-living comparisons, including the grocery prices elsewhere on this site, model food from a country's overall price level. This ranking does not: it is the World Bank's measured cost of the cheapest combination of local foods that meets a healthy-diet standard, priced from what shops actually charge.

Checked against it, modelled grocery prices understate food by about 30% at the median across 153 countries — the United States, which such models are usually priced from, is an unusually cheap place to eat well. The food tool shows the gap country by country.

It is a least-cost diet per person, not what a typical household spends, and a cheap diet can still be out of reach: the tool shows the share of people who cannot afford it. A country whose local figure does not convert consistently at the official exchange rate is left out rather than shown at a misleading dollar price.

# Country Per person per day Note
1 🇵🇰 Pakistan $0.92 a day 2025
2 🇹🇿 Tanzania $0.92 a day 2025
3 🇮🇳 India $0.93 a day 2025
4 🇪🇬 Egypt $0.95 a day 2025
5 🇳🇵 Nepal $1.06 a day 2025
6 🇧🇾 Belarus $1.11 a day 2025
7 🇨🇩 DR Congo $1.13 a day 2025
8 🇰🇿 Kazakhstan $1.13 a day 2025
9 🇷🇺 Russia $1.13 a day 2025
10 🇲🇬 Madagascar $1.19 a day 2025
11 🇷🇼 Rwanda $1.19 a day 2025
12 🇧🇯 Benin $1.21 a day 2025
13 🇬🇲 Gambia $1.29 a day 2025
14 🇱🇰 Sri Lanka $1.29 a day 2025
15 🇧🇫 Burkina Faso $1.30 a day 2025

How this is worked out: Cost of a healthy diet (CoHD), World Bank Food Prices for Nutrition, local currency converted at the site's FX snapshot, newest year per country, lowest first. Countries failing the exchange-rate consistency check are excluded. Refreshed 2026-09-18. Estimates for comparison, not advice.

Check your own numbers

A ranking is a starting point, not an answer — your income, household and destination change the order. The Food cost runs the same engine against your own figures, and every country above links to its own page.

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