Drinks Price Index 2026: 72 Cities Ranked

We scored every city in our index on the price tier of the bars our editors track there. Each venue is graded $ to $$$$. A city full of $$$$ rooms scores near 100. A city of honest $$ neighbourhood bars scores low. The result is one number per city, comparable across all 72.

Dubai leads at 84.8, ahead of Marrakech on 82.5 and Seoul on 80.0. Krakow is the cheapest big-city night out in the index at 59.0, with Copenhagen and Houston close behind. The gap between top and bottom is 25.8 points, a real spread in what a round costs before you have ordered a thing.

How the index is built

The score is a venue price index, not a receipt. We take the share of $, $$, $$$ and $$$$ bars our editors track in each city, weight them one through four, and rescale to a 0 to 100 figure. It measures how expensive the rooms are, which is the part of a night out you cannot control once you pick the city.

We label it as a venue-tier index on purpose. A clean, comparable count of actual local-currency drink prices across 72 cities does not exist in any single trustworthy source, so we report what we can defend from our own dataset and sense check the direction against independent cost indexes below.

The cost data agrees on direction

Independent measures put the same cities near the top. Singapore, Zurich and Dubai rank among the world's most expensive cities for the wealthy in the Julius Baer lifestyle index, with Dubai climbing to seventh globally per Engel and Voelkers and Singapore holding the top spot per IDN Financials. City-level drink prices track the same pattern in the crowdsourced Numbeo draft-beer index and the annual Mercer Cost of Living ranking.

What it means for a night out

If the bill matters, the cheap end of the table rewards you. Krakow, Copenhagen, Houston and Amsterdam all sit below 62, and a good cocktail bar there still pours world class. The top of the table, Dubai, Marrakech, Seoul and Singapore, is where a single round can match a meal, so plan the night around one or two standout rooms rather than a crawl.

For the cheapest cities laid out in full, see our State of Nightlife 2026 report and the price split behind it in Craft Beer vs Cocktails. To browse by city, start with the full city index or jump to London cocktail bars.