Guide
Grocery prices in Europe by country: the official table, with its surprises
By Covered Abroad Research Desk · Last verified July 2026
The table: food and non-alcoholic beverages, EU = 100
From Eurostat's price level indices for food and non-alcoholic beverages (category A0101, 2025, EU-27 average = 100) — the same like-for-like methodology as our headline cost comparison:
| Country | Food price level (EU=100) |
|---|---|
| Spain | 95.3 |
| Netherlands | 99.4 |
| Italy | 101.1 |
| Portugal | 102.0 |
| Germany | 102.4 |
| Belgium | 104.5 |
| Greece | 105.3 |
| France | 106.8 |
| Austria | 109.5 |
| Malta | 112.9 |
The spread is tighter than people assume — 95 to 113 across ten countries — because food retail is Europe's most integrated, discounter-driven market. Your supermarket bill varies far less across these borders than your rent does.
Source: Eurostat, price level indices (prc_ppp_ind_1), food and non-alcoholic beverages, 2025, read 29 August 2026.
The three surprises the folk map gets wrong
Spain is the grocery bargain, not Greece or Portugal. At 95.3, Spain is the only one of our ten below the EU food average — the discounter wars and domestic produce chain doing their work — while its overall price level (91.1) already ranked it cheap. Spain is that rare thing: cheap overall and cheap at the till.
"Cheap" countries are not cheap at the supermarket. Greece — the lowest overall price level of our ten — pays 105.3 for food, more than Germany at 102.4. Portugal tells the same story: 85.3 overall, 102.0 for food. The southern discount lives in housing and services, not in the shopping trolley; island and peripheral logistics push food the other way.
Malta pays the most. 112.9 — the import-dependence premium — which pairs instructively with Malta's subsidised utilities elsewhere in our data: the same geography that makes electricity policy cheap makes cornflakes expensive.
The general lesson for movers budgeting a country switch: check each spending category against its own index, because the overall number hides opposite stories inside it.
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Check my policyUsing this honestly in a relocation budget
Three disciplines keep this table useful rather than misleading. Weight it by your basket: food is typically a tenth to a fifth of a household budget, so a 10-point food gap moves your total cost of living by one or two points — housing gaps move it far more, and our cost comparison keeps the categories separate for exactly this reason. Remember what an index is not: it prices a standard basket nationally — your Lisbon farmers' market and your rural Andalusian butcher sit inside a national average, not at it. And date it: 2025 values carry Eurostat's preliminary flag, and food indices move with harvests and energy.
Country deep-dives with the overall-versus-food contrast spelled out: Spain and Portugal. And the budget line that never varies by country on this site: one EU-region insurance rate card, identical from Lisbon to Vienna — the published prices are the same wherever the trolley is cheaper.